The Aspects of Death

Life is always flowing on like a river, sometimes with murmurs, sometimes without, bending this way and that, we do not exactly see why, now in beautiful picturesque places, now through bare and uninteresting scenes, but always flowing, and with a look of treachery about its flowing, it is so swift, so voiceless, yet so continuous. We naturally begin with life, when we come to speak of death. The aspects of death make us think of the aspects of life. These last are easily summed up. They are simple aspects, aspects of a very terrible simplicity. All life and all lives are travelling towards God. Time is sucking us onward with an insidious rapidity, even when suffering or sameness make life seem to be going slowly. Time rushes, even when it feels as if it dragged. All the actions of life are reparable, except the last, and that is absolutely irreparable, even by any supernatural process. Moreover that last act, which is death, fixes all the other actions of life, and gives them their final meaning. That end of life is also the same to all, the same end to the -most variously adventurous lives. Such are the aspects of life. They are aspects of death also. Life gives the character to death. Death is the interpretation of life. The Sacred Writer makes bold to say that he, who always remembers his life s end, shall never do amiss. The remembrance of death must therefore be a notable feature in the spiritual life. We must study this, death, the remembrance of which is such an adversary to sin, such an aid to holiness.

Let us consider, first of all, the act of dying. It is very simple and very short. Yet all men fear it, and some fear it so much that it casts a shadow over their whole lives. It is the separation of body and soul, the end of that long companionship between them, which is a mystery we have never been able to fathom, and which we should have imagined, if we had not been otherwise taught, involved our very existence, our personality. "We can make no satisfactory picture to ourselves of a life without a body. We only know that there is such a life, and that it is a very wonderful one wherever it is lived, and that we shall one day live it somewhere, remaining the same persons that we are now. But how the soul will disentangle itself from that complicated body, in which it now lives ubiquitously, we cannot tell. We only know of certain con ditions of the body which hinder it from being the residence of life. Therefore the soul lays it down, and speedily the rejected body flows away in atoms, first the lighter, then the grosser, along that swift, changeful, interweaving current of matter, which girdles the whole world, and is put to all manner of unexpected uses, and submits to millions of unforeseen appropriations. Then, having thus served God briskly and diligently with every one of its busy atoms through all the ages till the day of doom, the body will recover itself with a mar vellous identity, and be ours again at the general resurrection. Mother and child, husband and wife, never met on earth with such extasy of love, as the body and soul of the just will meet at the resurrection.

This act of dying is moreover a punishment, and the most ancient of all punishments. It is the Creator s first punishment of the sinning creature, invented by the Creator Himself, the first promulgated invention of His vindictive justice. It can therefore under any cir cumstances hardly be a light one, whether we consider the Being who thus punishes, or the thing punished, which is sin. Indeed it is a penalty which nothing could render tolerable to the creature, except the Creator Himself suffering it, and diffusing the balm of His own death over the universal deaths of men. It is true that men have desired to die, and they have sinned by the desire, because it was the fruit of an unsanctified impatience. Others have desired to die, but then they were men who had also in them the grace to desire to suffer.

Some have desired to die, because they pined for God, and the pains of death were a small price to pay for so huge a good; still they were distinguishably a price. Some deaths have been so beautiful, that they can hardly be recognized for punishments. Such was the death of St. Joseph, with his head pillowed on the lap of Jesus. Yet the twilight bosom of Abraham was but a dull place compared with the house of Nazareth, which the eyes of Jesus lighted. Such was Mary s death, the penalty of which was rather in its delay. It was a soft extinction, through the noiseless flooding of her heart with divine love. Yet divine love is a sharp fire to all flesh which is not yet glorified. Nowhere then has death altogether put off its penal character. Martyrdom is a crown, precisely because it is a cross also. To us death is a punishment due on more indict ments than would fill a volume, or could be recited between sunrise and sunset. Yet youth, youth that is young in years, and older youth that is young in holiness, are sometimes illadvised enough to speak smartly and lightly about this great thing death. A punish-

O / X ment, the oldest punishment, the punishment of God s own pure invention, we may not do otherwise than tremble at it. It is a surprising mercy that we are even bidden to be hopeful.

Furthermore, this penal act of dying has ordinarily to be performed at a time and under circumstances when, humanly speaking, we are least capable of a grave and solemn action; or else it is performed so suddenly that it hardly comes under the notion of an act at all. Its natural season is when bodily and men tal weakness are both exercising their empire over us, and when our will is as little free as it can be, remain ing free at all. It is almost an essential part of the punishment of death, that it takes us at a disadvantage. We want a strong body undistracted by torture, an unclouded mind and a collected will to do many things at once, a long work in a short time, a delicate, perilous, manifold, multiform, work, requiring a thousand eyes, and a thousand hands, and a mind, and a memory which perfect calmness may multiply into a thousand memories and a thousand minds. In a word, we never need to be more thoroughly alive than at the moment when we come to die. Instead of which the life is just going out of us. It is flickering in a sort of second childhood. It is engrossed by the pains and cares of this world. Earth never makes itself more imperiously sensible to the soul, than when in a few moments there will be earth no more to us. Speaking naturally, the physical circumstances which bring about our death render all its other circumstances just the reverse of what we could have wished. But we must not complain of this. It is the specialty of the punishment.

It is to be thought of, and profited by, rather than lamented. It belongs to all death. The death which has least of it, the death which in itself is most free from this being taken at a disadvantage, is a public execution, as if, when men made death their punishment of their guilty fellow, God withdrew from it some of the frightening aspects, which it has as His punishment. Except martyrdom, an unjust public execution would be the most commodious manner of dying, so far as the arrangement of the outward circumstances of death is concerned.

Our forefathers believed, and probably not untruly, that there were especial places which were dear to evil spirits, and which from predilection they haunted from age to age. AVhoever dwelt in such places, unless they were strong in the grace of Christ, w^ere harassed by these evil spirits, and w r ere more or less under their influence. There is no doubt that where death is busy, the evil spirits are busy also. A deathbed is a choice time and place for their presence and their machina tions. It is their last chance with the departing soul. If alas! he has been their willing prey for years, though as the life is so shall the end be, yet they are not quite secure. Some great compassion of Jesus, some vehement prayer of Mary, some strong sacrament, may break in upon the circle of evil which they fancy they have traced around their victim. The possibilities of mercy are a terror to them. They must be there to guard and claim their own. If death comes at the end of a long and dubious struggle between good and evil, much more need is there for their activity and their stratagems. Final graces are common every day, graces by which the cVying soul is illuminated and fortified to make those supernatural acts of repentance, fear, and love by which he is reunited to God, and the Blood of Jesus triumphs at the last. Salvation hung on the balance, and is now secured. From such a deathbed the demons dare not to be absent. They have the Guardian Angel to counterwork. They have the sacra ments to baffle. They have the early teaching of the faith about sin and about contrition to suffocate. Alas they are often enough successful, to make all their patient assiduity well worth their while. Even with the faithful disciples of Christ, they have a chance, a chance which they too often realize. There is such a thing as a bad death after a good life. Men, who have been keeping to God, or seeming to us to do so, for a long while, have visibly fallen away from Him at the last. If it be but a possibility, let it plunge us in silent fear. Even when the demons are hopeless, they swarm round the dying bed, were it only to harass the servant of our Lord. They may lead him into some venial sin, or some sad unworthiness, or diminish his merits, or lengthen his purgatory. It is the law of their fearful hatred to be always working against the interests of Jesus. Thus it is that where death is, there they are, wounded by heavenly presences, irritated by sweet tranquil heroisms of humble faith, galled by the powers of the Church, and thwarted by the grand energies of the sacraments: nevertheless they are there, to see if perchance they can make any irruption into the kingdom of light: and their presence must be considered as wellnigh inseparable from the act of dying.

Death is also not unfrequently a secret chamber in which God appoints a private and special interview with His failing creature. Sometimes it is to praise, and cheer, and to give us an assurance and a foretaste of our bliss. Sometimes it is to punish, mercifully, very mercifully, yet also, considering time and place, very severely, as if He partially judged us before the time, that He might punish us on this side the grave. He has perhaps been offended with particular acts of our past life, and He has said nothing, but waited till now, and now He punishes. Either He sends panics into our souls, or gives us a piercing vision of these particular faults, or permits temptations, such temptations as are congenial to those faults; or in some other way He chas tises us, and it is hard to bear, though it is a mighty love. He thus makes death doubly a punishment, a private punishment as well as a public one. In many cases the deathbed is thus a double one. There is the deathbed, with the priest, and the physician, and the friends, around the ailing creature; and there is the same deathbed in an inner room, where the Father of all creatures is alone with His child, in communications too intimate ever to be disclosed to living ear. We may well fear this silent visit of our Eternal Father. Yet it is to be our joy to live with Him for ever; let us bear then with filial submission the pains which His compassionate but exceeding jealousies may give us at that last hour of life.

Such is the act of dying, with the circumstances which ordinarily belong to it. But we must not omit also to recount some of its features, which are familiar to all of us, yet are needful to the picture. The first is, that it is inevitable. It comes to all. There is no escape. There are no exceptions. I remember as a boy succeeding in persuading myself that I should not die, and living for some years in that persuasion. It was not that I thought myself better than others. But I fancied something would happen, the end of the world or something. I was not particular about my motives of credibility for what I was so eager.to believe. But the opposite conviction, which was not forced upon me till my teens, brought with it a season of crushed hopes and incessant hauntings, which I tremble to think of even now. Perhaps all children have once had a half-formed delusive hope that they individually will not die. With myself it is to this day always an interesting truth, one that never palls, never tires, never grows dull through familiarity, but is always stirring, and new, and original, that death is inevitable. Different things happen to different men. God never seems to repeat destinies. All destinies are individual. Each man has his own. But it is the common destiny to die.

Moreover it is an act of which we have no experience, because it is done only once. We may seem to all intents and purposes to have died before. We may have believed we were dying, and may have arranged ourselves with such self-collection as we could. We may have made what we were sure was our last confession. We may have been anointed, and had the last blessing of the Church. Our eye may have closed, and our head sunk back heavily into insensibility. But God knew we were not dying. Probably the evil spirits knew we were not dying. So that many supernatural realities were absent from that seeming death, which will be present at our actual death. No I We have no experience of dying. This is the simple fact. What follows from it? Something of great importance, which is not without terror also, namely, that as we have no experience of it, we can form no habit of it, and it is habit which at once makes the thing to be done easier, and us who do it calmer in the doing. But may not this be said of any important action, which is to be clone for the first time? Yes! but then it is another feature of death, that with it there is- no next time. It has to be done but once. Everything depends upon the doing of it well. However it is done, well or ill, it is simply irreparable. Once over, all discussion, deliberation, retrospect, discovery of mistakes, fresh plans, are out of the question. It was one, absolute,, final, immutable act; arid now that it is done, it must be left as it is, helplessly fertile of eternal consequences,. It also adds to the difficulty of dying with that tranquillity, dignity, and preparation, which we should desire, that the time of it is uncertain. Age furnishes us with the merest probabilities regarding it, which have a certain universal likelihood about them, available to staticians, helpful to insurance offices, capable of feeding ambitious or mercenary expectations. But to the individual they are in reality no probabilities at all. There is no improbability in our dying this very next moment. Perhaps we shall. Then, when the moment elapses, the next moment succeeds to the same possibility, nay to a possibility increasing continually into a greater likelihood. It is the hereditary property of all the moments of life, by night or by day. Sudden deaths are far from uncommon. They also often come in batches in the same neighbourhood, as if there was an undiscovered law about them, which there probably is. Indeed the freedom of all human actions seems to have amplest scope in its sphere, and yet to have a sphere, and to represent a law even though it is not controlled by it. The statistics of crime appear to indicate some such mysterious and unmanageable fact. So then there is no such improbability of a sudden death. The known peculiarities of our constitutions may increase the probabilities to us individually, as, for example, if we have been threatened with apoplexy,

G8 ON DEATH.

or have a cognizable heart- complaint. On the other hand the extremest old age cannot be sure of dying the next moment. Even when we are in our agony, science can only give us an approximation to the length of its endurance. Thus it is one of the universal features of death, to which even martyrdom and public executions are not infallible exceptions, that the moment of death is uncertain. We may be rescued from martyrdom, or our grace may fail, or rather our correspondence to it, and we may save ourselves by apostasy. We may be pardoned on the scaffold, or we may die before the moment of our execution comes. Death is therefore universally uncertain. If it gives us warning by an illness, it is a grace. If there is a prediction of sudden death in the specialty of our constitutions, that is a still greater grace. But further than this, death spares none of us the full inconvenience of its uncertainty.

Let us now take a history of dying, and imagine it under the most favourable circumstances. The man shall have notice to die, time to die, and all the best circumstances of dying. Let us assume it to happen in our own case. An illness comes to us. From the first we perceive that it is of a serious character. We have feelings within ourselves, so different from those of previous illnesses that we cannot but account of them as prophecies of death. We see our danger in the eyes of those around us. We are fortunate in being sur rounded by Christians, and therefore, at whatever risk of actually hastening our death by agitation, we are told, gently but plainly, that the end is come. Those who love us make a great sacrifice of themselves in telling us this. It is the kindest of all kindnesses, although the withholding of it would be cruelty and sin. Many souls are in hell now from this selfish cruelty.

Mothers have thus sent their children there, not seeing that it was to spare themselves rather than their children that they were so barbarously silent. Husbands too there have been who lost their last chance, because the love of their wives was but a covert selfishness. O there is little love on earth which puts the soul before the body!

"We have received the announcement of our approaching end with calmness, but not without considerable fear. God has been our first thought. Happy for us, if He has always been so! We know that the great work is to be done with Him down in the depths of our own souls. We send for the priest, and with such examination of conscience as we can, or, better still, from notes prepared beforehand, we make a general confession of our whole lives. We detest all our sins from the bottom of our hearts, so far as we can be judges of our own sincerity. We abhor them as offences against God, with an abhorrence that involves the strongest purpose of not repeating them, should we be unexpectedly raised up from this seeming deathbed. Indeed years have already passed since we committed them. So we trust here is evidence of our efficacy of purpose. Nevertheless we are so weak, are suffering so much from bodily pain, and are altogether so tremulous and fluttered, that we certainlv do not feel that m sensibly keen sorrow which we had beforehand hoped to feel. The priest however, who has questioned us anxiously, is satisfied with our answers, and we are absolved. In our lives before we have never doubted an absolution; but now we would fain have something more like an assurance of its validity. For consider what a brink it is we are on! But it is still twilight. Faith is a light, but it is not open day yet.

We make a profession of our faith, especially in the real presence of Jesus with us in His sacrament of love. We doubt nothing. The pillow under our head is not a rest more palpable than the truth of our dearest Lord s Divinity is to our soul, now grown heavy with the heaviness of death. We feel we have never known our Blessed Lady till now, so manifest has her maternal office become to us, so clearly is she one of the nurses round our bed. Even dark things are plain now. Faith is just going to dissolve like a mist. The boun daries of faith and sight are ceasing to be denned. Truly we shall need faith in purgatory; but it is under conditions there, which give it the certainty of sight, without the bliss of the Vision. Furthermore, we think if we have any enemies. None perhaps that we know of; for enemy is a strong word. However, we forgive from the bottom of our hearts any such that there may be, and all who have ever wronged us, were it only to the amount of a sarcastic speech or an unkind look. We also beg pardon of all whom we have ever offended in the heyday of our selfish health, and in the velocity of our success. We see more of this in our memories than we were aware of. So we cleanse our hearts of all little spites, jealousies, suspicions, vindictivenesses, unbeliefs, distastes, prejudices, persuasions, hardnesses, unforgivingnesses, and wants of sympathy, which we now see to have been fearfully against charity. What evil plight we were in in this respect, and we had not a suspicion of it! Thank God for this last sharp light! But we are growing exhausted.

Nevertheless here is a great effort to be made. Our Lord is coming, as our Viaticum. We must rally all the flagging energies of our souls. We would kneel if they would only let us. We will do our best. Alas! bodily weakness has gone too far. We have managed to swallow, and we have sunk back with our eyes closed, very tired, yet happy. Still we remember sweeter Communions than this Viaticum, more love, more heat, more sensible union. Death is a great distraction. ISTo doubt of it. We are making but a poor thanksgiving. This also we have often done better in lifetime. But they are rousing us now to receive Extreme Unction. It is soft and soothing. Yet perhaps it calls unconfessed sins to mind. We have certainly been more sensual and comfortlovino- in our lives, than we have ever accused ourselves o * of being. But this is a sacrament of capacious recepta cles. There is no saying what grace it holds. We know that in its abysses the relics and after-harvests of the sins of the longest life are put away, and buried with an eternal burying. Singular sacrament of most indefinite magnificence! let me not be defrauded of thee at the last!

There is time left. It is filled up with a variety of acts, spoken or unspoken, as the case may be. Short acts of love of God are multiplied continually, together with ejaculations betokening our utter trust in the Precious Blood of Jesus. Acts of sorrow for sin are also perpetually recurring to our lips, feeble perhaps, but sincere. We voluntarily accept death in penance for our sins, and we humbly tell God so. We hardly know what we say, but we mean by it all that it can be made to mean, all that He takes it to mean. Our tongue is swollen, and our voice is as good as gone. We have no moisture to make words with. But in the silent cham bers of our hearts Holy Names are echoing softly, as if they were the last whisperings of grace, as if faith would die professing itself, even though none of those around could hear. Our confessor is less help to us than we thought he would be; as if we had got so near God now, that we were under His sole, or rather His immediate, jurisdiction. Yet also the confessor is of immense use, with his repeated absolutions, his holy water, his signs of the cross, his mere anointed presence, the character on his brow, his hands impregnated with the odour of the Host. Long since, his suggestions ceased to help us, because we had ceased to hear. Then we could see his words shape themselves on his lips. Now that is gone: there is a teasing blue film: now a darkness, and with it a painful desire for light, but no tongue to tell it with. Is everything done? Are we ready? No! now there are many things to say. Alas! they cannot be said. There are many things to do, so many that some one must help us to put them in order. Order! that is what we want. "We could put things in order once. Now we have lost the power. What shall we do first? But what is this? Can the end be come? Earth is going, or we are leaving it: whither are we sinking? Will no one bear us up? It is growing light.

Yes! the soul has left the body, and our last, or almost our last, thought as we went was, that there were still so many things left to do. Yet this is death under its most favourable circumstances, in truth the circumstances of the favoured few. So we believe it always is with all deaths, that the last object the light of death falls upon is the manifest fact, that there are still so many things left to do. This, depend upon it, is one of the invariable aspects of Christian death, that it conies a little suddenly, a little too soon, when we were nearly ready but not quite; so that we set off on that last journey, as on so many other journeys, leaving something behind which we meant to take. What is left behind always seems indispensable: the mercy is that in reality it is not so. Our death had its sufficiency; it only wanted its finish. But this is a law: all deaths want it. Yet it is a want which makes the prospect somewhat more nervous.

Let us now consider some of the varieties of death, in order that we may obtain a yet more complete idea of its manifold aspects. It is probable that no two deaths are quite alike. Each man s death is individual, like himself, like his vocation on earth, like his grace on this side the grave, and like his glory on the other. Even such varieties of death as we can classify are extremely numerous, and more than we have space to enter upon here. We must content ourselves with selecting some of the more common ones.

First of all, there is sudden death. This is as if we were alive at the end of the world, when Christ comes, and we die as we are caught up into the air to meet Him. Or, again, it is as though we never died, but were judged without the intermediate step of death. "We lose death, so far as it is an opportunity. We have a season of grace less than other men. Our eternal doom is risked more fearfully than with other men. Death is a means of salvation. Sudden death deprives us of this. Hence none but an irreligious mind can ever desire a sudden death, although it is very tempting so far as the momentariness of the physical pain is concerned, or the consecutive endurance of that long harrowing drama in many acts, of which death is so often composed. But the importance of death is in its position, as the barrier between time and eternity. Consequently our eternal interests are the grand objects to secure; and for the most part, the more death puts us through, the more dying we have, the greater is the likelihood of our making good the eternity beyond. Even although a sudden death is not necessarily an unprovided death, the Church makes us pray against both of them. We have not only no right to be uncaged so swiftly, but it is unsafe also. Indeed we have already seen that all deaths are sudden, and that this suddenness, this surprise, is one of the disquieting aspects of our last great act. We cannot afford therefore to wish it less sudden than it is too sure to be. There is a deep feeling in the minds of men, that a sudden death is a judgment from God. There is no doubt an equally deep truth, which this feeling represents. At the same time the rule is so far from being invariable, especially since our Blessed Lord s death, which has given death quite a new countenance, that we may never dare to attribute it in the case of others to their sins and to God s anger. They may be taken suddenly, as if by a swift blast of compassion, from occasions of sin or from trying circumstances, which would be too much for their strength. Some persons with a tendency to particular diseases fall down dead, and yet these are hardly sudden deaths, because, if they have been aware of that tendency, they have had preparation thrust upon them all through life. Still they have been deprived of an opportunity. Perhaps also a sudden death may often imply a long purgatory, inasmuch as our last illness and death make a great theatre for Christian satisfaction, to say nothing of the facile indulgences which crowd round the children of the faith at that last hour.

Opposed to this, we have lingering deaths, deaths of weeks or months, like those of consumption, to which the Italians give the name of " deaths of the predestinate," a title which some holy men, with a venturous trust in the divine compassions and a magnificent faith in tile sacraments, have given to public executions, These lingering deaths, however, look more desirable, than they turn out to be for the most part in reality. The fact is, they are too long. All tilings are best in moderation, even the allowance of time to die in. Lingering deaths seem to give us ample time for preparation; but the truth is they injure our preparation by giving us too much. Many of the diseases, which imply such deaths, are also especially subject to false hopes, to a disbelief in the proximity of death; and this is a basis of many perilous temptations. Moreover we get callous as the process goes on, and a valetudinarian love of comfort is by no means a wholesome atmosphere to die in. The suspension of penance is an awkward moment in which to accomplish the transit from time to eternity. An unworthy desire of death grows upon us. We look at it as a physical relief. We become impatient to die, yet not impatient to see God; and for this very insensibility revelations have disclosed to us that there is a special purgatory. Further more, venial sins accrue very rapidly in these protracted deaths, sins of impatience, of immortification, of temper, of selfishness, and of censoriousness about our nurses. We come also to dispense ourselves too easily from ejaculatory prayers and the application of our minds to God. Our virtue softens before dying, softens dangerously, and may need a sharp purgatory to anneal it again. Indeed these lingering deaths, while they seem to mean a short purgatory, may often have to be followed by a long purgatory, just because they themselves were so long. There is no one familiar with deathbeds, who has not observed how often the grace of dying well wears out before its time. For a while the death pro mises to be more than good, to be saintly, to be wonderful. Then it is as if grace had been given in material quantity, so much to last so many hours, and the poor sufferer outlives his grace, and dies at last, not, let us hope, a dubious death, but by no means a death which it will be any pleasure, for us who love him, to remember in the retrospect. It would be unwise of us, there fore, to desire these very lingering deaths. I believe all deaths to be mercies, since the day our Lord died; mercies to the individual whose needs and peculiarities his Heavenly Father knows. But, speaking of these lingering deaths in themselves, they are less desirable really than they seem.

Then there are deaths from violent pain. Each man probably has a special dread of some particular disease; and this dread is not unfrequently a prophecy of its fixing upon him at the last. While we shrink from all great pain, we are all most anxious to choose the kind of pain which is to be inevitable to ourselves. When we have fallen into the power of a pain w T hich we especially shun, we are like men whom a wild beast is holding down. There is a sort of despairing horror which it is hard to change into a religious disposition. Indeed it is true of all pain, that it is more often a distraction from God than a memento of Him. Those things, which make God most indispensable to us, are far from being the things which most successfully drive us into the arms of God. Love has always been a completer instrument than fear. To be sanctified by illness is quite one of the rarest phenomena of the spiritual life. Some of the oreatest writers on asceticism have noticed this.

It is only high holiness which is not distracted, lowered, and made animal, by pain. A death from violent pain, therefore, will only sanctify those who have a previously formed interior spirit, which will enable them to bear it rightly. While it is a terrible affliction to the by standers, it is often a mark of divine love. We may also believe that it frequently stands in the stead of purgatory. In experience we see that it is repeatedly accompanied by an unusual gift of contrition, which is one of the clearest signs of predestination. It is sometimes also the lot of those, who in lifetime have been too easy with themselves in the matter of bodily penance; and then it comes to them partly as a punishment, but much more as a merciful opportunity making up in its single self for many neglected opportunities. Those also who have wanted that gentleness, childlikeness, and considerate affection, which weak health and constant bodily pain are made by grace to produce, are sometimes visited by this land of death, in order that it may produce a change in their souls corresponding to those qualities. The most we can say of such a death is, that it is a grand, but most difficult, opportunity of sanctification.

We now come to a quiet easy death. This also, like the long lingering death, is less desirable than at first sight it appears, though doubtless to multitudes it is an immense mercy, a special tenderness of God. For there are some souls so fragile, they look as if the mere act of dying will shatter them to pieces. There are some characters which are weakly rather than imperfect; and it is such who are often as it were indulged by this kind of death. It seems to be no augury of long or short purgatory, but appears sometimes as if it were the beginning of not a very high place in heaven. It is also a common termination of a life of suffering, as if purgatory were already over, and death on the other side of the judgment-seat rather than on this. A life without great sins often ends with a death like this, and a life with a very strongly marked vocation almost always so. For such a life is a life of strong light, of definite consciousness; and its grand result is a great gift of tranquillity; and to such men death almost loses the character of death. It is a great action which comes in their way, and is done greatly and quietly, without drama and without emphasis. Certain forms of the spiritual life are followed by such deaths. It has been curiously remarked by St. Andrew Avellino,¹ that those, who have a special devotion to the Passion, generally die quiet and sweet deaths, as Mary, John, and Magdalen did.f Certainly it is remarkable that while most of those about our Lord died violent deaths, the three who assisted at Calvary should have died so softly, as if already their real death had been died there. Yet a quiet easy death is not without its dangers, such as drowsiness, inapprehension, unsuspectingness, inaction, delusion, and the like. There are some men whose energies and sensibilities seem always to go to sleep when the rough cold weather of life comes on, men who have no winters, but who, like marmots in their bur-² rows, live lives of endless summers pieced together by this lying dormant in the cold. They are men who are no better for anything which happens to them, nay, which is almost a more hopeless feature, are no worse for anything which happens. To them what can a quiet death be but a judgment? It is God letting them die without awakening them. We may remark of all quiet deaths, that they are not converting deaths, nor deaths for repentances to be done in. Conversion must be done before, or it will not be done then.

Let us consider one more variety of death, death amidst temptations. This is very terrible, yet not un common. It is very often the end of a careless life, of a life negligent in details, which contented itself with generals rather than particulars, and took liberties with God, and made free with the precepts of the Church, and was w an ting in reverence and fear. Then, on the other hand, it is sometimes also the end of a very holy life, especially if it is cut short in point of years. For years of merit may be acquired in moments of death bed temptations. Temptation always accelerates the speed of grace. But this is eminently the case on deathbeds. God may visit His servants with such a death in order to enable them to gain greater glory in heaven. Or it may be that their spiritual life has been wanting in inward trials, and that the mystical purgation of their spirits may not have been complete, and therefore He vouchsafes to perfect their holiness by this manner of death. On this side the grave Divine Love has no crucible more delicate than this of a death amidst temptations. Yet it is one which is most painful to the survivors, because it is curtained round with impenetrable gloom, indeed with anxiety and dismay, if the temptations have lasted to the end. But in most cases it is not so. Just at last the cloud lifts, and dis closes a golden horizon, with its outline clear and its edge defined. Could we but bend over, what should we see but the brightness of a blessed eternity, and the vicinity of an immediate heaven, with no deep lake of cleansing fire between? Sad as the first prospect of these curtains of temptation is to the beholder, they cover some operations of grace which for grandeur and sublimity have no equals elsewhere. Moreover they are graces which are instantaneously efficacious. They turn lofty things in upon our souls in a moment. They fix and stereotype all previous acquisitions of grace. They are the very beginnings of eternal glory, desperately painful, like extasies, because they are out of place, and come before their time. But the high and the low, how often do they lie together in the same coil, where spiritual matters are concerned! These same tempta tions are not unfrequently a penal retribution to easy and ungenerous souls for neglecting certain portions of the spiritual life, and especially, for neglecting habits of mental prayer. Ah! how many dry meditations are waiting: for us at that last turn in life, to refresh our scorched souls with their unexpected dew; and how many omitted and shortened meditations are also waiting for us there, to sting us like scorpions, when we shall find the pain least tolerable! There are many things which it is hard to face in death; there are few harder to face than neglected prayer.

Such are some of the varieties of death. What the varieties of result may be, which they each of them realize, is beyond our sight. They are the first parts of eternity, indescribable, unimaginable. There may be some souls, whom death runs far onward into eternity, and some whom it leaves only at the edge. All are safe with God. Tiieso then are the aspects of that great phenomenon of lenth, not a foreign thing, but something which we ourselves have to pass through. As the life is, so shall the end be. Can we say less than that death is the whole significance of life?

Footnotes

1. Vita. 8vo. Edition p. 59. ↩

2. It is remarkable that the death of St. John has been the subject of some most interesting special revelations. One is recorded by S. Bridget in the first chapter of her fourth book, where St. John says to her: "After the Mother of God I passed from this world by a most light death, because I had been her guardian." In the twenty-third chapter of the same fourth book, the Saint says that she heard our Blessed Lady say to St. John, " God called you out of the world by a most light death, qula Virgo Virglnifuit commendata." S. Gertrude also in the fourth chapter of her fourth book speaks of her wonder at St. John s tranquil death, and of our Lord s answer to her questions, in which He says that He look John out of the world by a death of jubilee. St. Mechtildis in the seventh chapter of her first book enumerates as the twelfth of the twelve privileges of St. John, that he died a painless death. See also the commentaries of Durandus de Sancte Angelo on S. Bridget, and the approbation of Horn Michel dc Escartin to the Mystical City of Agreda. ↩