The Characteristics of Death

Death is an unsurveyed land, an unarranged science. There are continual new discoveries being hourly made in it by all men in person. All human actions are wonderful things. Each of them seems to contain o depths of miracle. As conscience is the best inward evidence of God, so human actions are the best outward evidences of Him. But this last human act, which closes all series of human actions, this act of dying, is the most fertile in wonders. Its interest is intense from whatever point of view we look at it, and we may be sure that no man, until he has died himself, at all appreciates the marvellousness of death. Perhaps, as I have said, no two deaths are quite alike; and the most delicate shades of difference between one death and another would probably disclose to us more of the ways of G-od and more of the capabilities of the soul, than philosophy has ever taught. But we never see death from the other side, from the eternal side; and therefore we cannot do justice to it. It is not a mere date; it is not simply the end of life. It is the confluence of time and eternity, the transition of grace into glory. It is a divine punishment made now into a most hidden operation of grace. Each separate death is an undisclosed secret between the Creator and the creature. So that, while we are studying death, it teases us to feel that we have to confine ourselves to what is general, while the real wonder of death is, more than is the case with most mysteries, in the details and the particulars. All we know is, that justice and mercy seem to come to us separately in life; whereas in death their operations are combined, and they are only one. Death belongs as much to the eternity which it begins, as to the life which it ends. Perhaps more. In life time we can but feel death on its outside, and report of its inward possibilities from its outward phenomena. Having thus estimated our speculations at no more than they are worth, let us pass from the aspects of death to consider its characteristics.

It has characteristic pains, characteristic temptations, characteristic graces, and characteristic joys, and we must study these in order. To contemplate the pains of death is like looking for the first time over some wide scene of savage and mountainous desolation. The heights are hung with melancholy clouds. The glens run up among the foldings of the hills, and are lost to view. A mist lies over the stone-sprinkled ground, which is so girdled with swamps as to be impenetrable. No man is wisely bold who can think, without some fear, of the journey he must one day make across that disconsolate region. Body, will, mind, affections, even our supernatural habits, have, each of them, pains of their own. With regard to the physical pains of death, we may suppose them, from many analogies, to be unlike any other pains. The separation of body and soul must itself be a strange, unbearable distress, even if it be not a positive pain. The face works at that moment, as it never works at any other time. The eyes look as if some woful surprise was in the soul. To all appearance there is something more than mere suffocation in the act of dying. At the same time it need not be that the physical pains of death should be greater than any others, or that they should be great at all. Experience and observation would seem to show that comparatively few persons die in much pain. Even where there has been great agony nearly up- to the last, the last itself has generally been in peace and in comparative ease. Medical science teaches us the same thing. It does not say death is not painful, but that it is not very painful, and that most men suffer pains in life, which, for mere amount of pain, exceed the pain of dying. Even physical fear, which would be itself a pain, is far less common than we should have expected. Perhaps there is not much consolation in this last feature of the case. For it would appear to intimate that the hour of death is even less favourable than we supposed for the transactions of the soul. No reasonable being, except under strong grace, could possibly confront death without fear, unless he were labouring under some deadness, dulness, or other proximity to stupefaction, brought on by the sickliness of the act itself; and such things as these do not promise well for that keen view of sin, and self, and God, which efficacious acts of faith, love, and sorrow must imply. It shows also the intense necessity of the powerful sacraments and benedictions of the Church, as supply ing; and filling out those inward acts which the state o o of the soul may render sluggish. Nevertheless, although the physical pains of death are often spoken of in an exaggerated way, there are possibilities enough to give us something like a feeling of dismay when we consider them. Yet they are far the least important of death s pains.

It is to be apprehended also, that our physical weakness will give rise to a peculiar mental pain. We clo not for the most part fall into such a state of torpor, as not to be sensible of the nature of our position. We understand what death is. The light of our faith is not dimmed. If sin, and self, and God, are not before us with their old clearness, they are clearly enough before us to be felt as overshadowing our souls.

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We have not become mere animals, though we seem on the road to it. Hence arises a peculiar pain, from the knowledge and feeling that our minds and energies are not up to the mark, are unequal to the occasion. We see a point close at hand, and we cannot reach it. We have a distinct ideal, and may not realize it. We believe, but our belief falls a little short. We grieve for sin, but our grief, like water poured over a garden on a winter s day, does not run into our souls, but freezes on the surface. We love, but it is the brightness of love without its fire. We know that a form of sound words is always valuable, because, outward as it is, it is almost always an interior help; but we feel now that we have to trust, rather more than we like to trust, to the orthodoxy and accuracy of our acts of faith, hope, love, and contrition. The wedding gar ments, in which we have so often clothed our souls, are found to have shrunk, just when it is too late to alter them, and here is the Bridegroom visibly riding up to the gate. We want so little, yet that little is so hopelessly wanted. All this, we trust, will be much more in the feeling than in the reality. Nevertheless, the result of it will be a feeling of impotence which will be most hard to bear, a sort of spiritual nightmare, a train of thought during a fall from a precipice, the sinking of a boat upon a shipless sea. It will be an inward sinking of soul, when we can least bear such sinkings. Surely it will make us sick at heart.

This is the mental pain which our present gives us. The contribution of our past will perhaps be heavier still. The very darkness, which is around us, will somehow concentrate the light on our past lives. Who does not know that the hour of death is an hour of revelations? We are already acquainted with the phenomena of the growing sensitiveness of conscience. We know how we come to see sin, where we saw none before, and what a feeling of insecurity about the past that new vision has often given us. Yet death is a sudden stride into the light. Even in our general con fessions the past was discernible in a kind of soft twi light: now it will be dragged out into unsheltered splendour. The dawn of the judgment, mere dawn though it be, is brighter than any terrestrial noon; and it is a Light which magnifies more than any human microscope. There lie fifty crowded years, or more. O such an interminable-seeming waste of life, with actions piled on actions, and all swarming with minutest incredible life, and an element of eternity in every nameless moving point of that teeming wilderness! How colossal will appear the sins we know of, so gigantic now that we hardly know them again! How big our little sins! How full of malice our faults that seemed but half-sins, if they were sins at all Then again, the forgotten sins, who can count them? Who believed they were half so many, or half so serious? The unsuspected sins, and the sinfulness of our ignorances, and the deliberateness of our indeliberations, and the rebellions of our selfwill, and the culpable recklessness of our precipitations, and the locust-swarms of our thought-peopled solitudes, and the incessant persevering cataracts of our poisoned tongues, and the inconceivable arithmetic of our multiplied omissions, and a great solid neglected grace lying by the side of each one of these things, and each one of them as distinct, and quiet, and quietly compassed, and separately contemplated, and overpoweringly light-girdled, in the mind of God, as if each were the grand sole truth of His self-sufficing unity! Who will dare to think that such a past will not be a terrific pain, a light from which there is no terrified escape? Or who will dare to say that his past will not look such to him, when he lies down to die? Surely it would be death itself to our entrapped and amazed souls, if we did not see the waters of the great flood rising far off, and sweeping onward with noiseless, but resistless, inundation, the billows of that Red Sea of our salvation, which takes away the sins of the world, and under which all those Egyptians of our own creation, those masters whom we ourselves appointed over us, with their living hosts, their men, their horses, their chariots, and their incalculable baggage, will look in the morning-light of eternity, but a valley of sunlit waters.

The future also comes to us in the shape of pain. It is an uncertainty, and uncertainty is hard to bear. The unspeakable greatness of the risk, the immensity of the interests at stake, the sense of utter inadequacy so far as our own merits are concerned, and our own sensible want of present energy, combine to make us perhaps exaggerate the uncertainty of our position, while the extreme nearness of the decision cannot but agitate us painfully. God may give us, as He so often does, a grace of calm assurance, which will counteract this agitation. But the agitation itself belongs to death as one of its proper pains, and we have no right to reckon on the grace. As our past life is magnified by the nearness of an all-holy judgment, so the mountains of eternity, like all mountains, look higher as we approach ^them. The grandeur of the reward almost dismays us. Can such things be for us? Are we fitting company for angels and for saints? Are we, such as we are, to -go and sit down at the foot of Mary s throne? Shall we in another fire minutes be clasping in speechless gratitude the Wounded Feet of Jesus? Can our purity bear the blaze of God, and not turn to ashes? Almost ty force our eyes are turned away from heaven. We look through the gloom in the direction of purgatory. Even that " profound lake" is too good for us. Yet how intolerable its pains! Its least pain, as seems most probable from authorities, greater than all the accumulated pains of mortals from Adam downwards, its long lingering delays, as revelations certify, the practically infinite capabilities of suffering in a separate soul, the weariness of waiting for the Vision which in tense desire makes more weary than any weariness we can know of, these are our uncertainties in that direction. Then, in another direction still, what unthinkable possibilities! The word of doom will be spoken soon. God has known all along what it is to be. A few more efforts in drawing our breath, and we shall know it too.

These are the pains of death, such pains as we have seen others bear, pains such that we can understand something of their nature. Eut who can doubt that there are also unknown and unimaginable pains to be met with in that dark valley, of a new sort, and which will not range themselves with other pains? These also must we think of with fear, and trust God for grace to bring us through them, arid for tenderness to measure them out to us in exceeding moderation.

"We come now to the temptations of death. Of course these are very various, and a dying man may be tempted to almost any sin. Nevertheless we are only to concern ourselves here with what may be called the characteristic temptations of death. It cannot be a matter of surprise to us, that the chief among these are temptations to infidelity. It is our faith which is saving us. It is upon our faith that we are leaning our whole weight. It is naturally there that the tempter will try us. Indeed the natural laws of our own minds, without any preternatural interference, would lead us to expect these very distressing temptations. We are trusting God just then for more than we have ever trusted Him before. Our trust in Him is all we have left. We are concen trating ourselves upon it. We can do but little ourselves, even in the way of cooperation, or correspondence to grace. The most active, and what is called edifying, deathbed is far more of a passive than an active exhibition. The very demand made upon our faith provokes doubt, while the extremity of its importance seems to magnify the doubt. These temptations often come to those who have been but little tempted in that way during life. If the absence of the temptations has been due to the brightness of their faith, the hour of trial comes now as an opportunity of higher sanctity. If it has been due to indifference and an inadequate interest in divine things, the temptations come now on a mission of punishment and retribution, adding another huge risk to the other risks with which the chamber of death is already so beset. But the cruel refining of these temptations is more fiery to those, who in lifetime have been subjected to them, and who with a sort of half-pious petulance and querulous exaggeration have dwelt upon them in their own minds, and spoken of them almost braggingly to others. These men soon bring about a habit of such temptations, and then earth be comes a hell, and life no longer a trial but a torture. They lose that beautiful dismay, in which the religious spirit is ever standing, self-astonished, before the majesty of God. Losinor that, there is little else left for them o * to lose. But the retribution at the hour of death is inconceivably dreadful.

So again boisterous, controversial minds seem likely to be assailed by this form of temptation.. Tempta tions against the faith for the most part belong to narrow minds. They generally betoken want of depth. Now boisterous minds are always narrow minds. They have generally fixed ideas, and if their fixed idea goes, all else goes with it. They have all their lives wished to be dictators, domestic or otherwise; and they can so little believe that people will not elect them to that office, that they take to clamouring, and even shrieking, as if they had lost all control, when things go silently on as if they had neither pronounced, acted, written, or made a sign, indeed as if they existed not. In spiritual, as well as in intellectual things, delicacy alone is strength. When these men confront a broad eternal truth, and confront it inside themselves, they find that they have fallen into a perfect ambush of temptations against the faith. Men of great activity are also subject to this trial. They have not made their religion sufficiently a part of their mind, or even of their heart. It has been mostly in their eye and in their arms. In these days especially, our own activity often persecutes us. Some men are positively hunted through life by themselves; and this strange self-pursuit makes them, not only a problem to others, but an amazement to themselves. A man, who lets himself have too many things to do, is always a foolish man, if he is not a guilty one; and he is apt to be eaten up by his own businesses, as Action was by his own dogs. On his deathbed he is alone. External things are gone. There is his habit of activity, and nothing but his one quality of faith left for him to exercise it on. He finds he has never fathomed the commonest things in religion, and now, with the ruling passion strong in death, he cannot rest, but fathoms the shallows of his own soul, and finds them bottomless. These are the classes of men whom these temptations visit: but they belong to the time and the place, and may visit all, even the most unlikely souls.

Temptations to despair form another class of temp tations which belong to deathbeds. But I believe them to be far from common. Even approaches to despair, misgivings which seem as if they could become tempta tions to despair, as if they could develope into them, are not ordinary features in a deathbed to any very great extent. In a certain degree they come to all, as might be expected, and in any degree they must necessarily be disquieting. But, in their fully developed state, we may set them down as extremely rare. They seem to spring from clearness of faith, combined with an absence of practical knowledge of God, and they would appear to be the punishment of a self-trusting life. Confidence in God is one of those elements of the supernatural life, which it is desirable should take also the form of a familiar habit; and certainly he who knows his own sinfulness for the first time, or the immensity of God s mercy for the first time, when he conies to die, may easily find despair to be the issue of the very undoubtingncss of his faith. We must however be careful to distinguish between temptations to despair, and those strange temptations to blasphemy of which we some times read. These last seem to take rank among the mystical trials of souls which are very high in grace, and whom God sees able to bear the extreme heat of such refining processes. I remember something like these temptations in a case, which certainly arose from the effects of stimulants given to the dying man, combined with the fulness of his mind upon religious sub jects; and partly the loss of his selfcontrol, and partly the sense that it was lost, and hence the effort to recover it, caused him to speak as he would not else have spoken.

When the beginnings of despair, or at least trouble amounting to more than misgiving, are perceived in the dying, those, who have intimately known such men s antecedents, have observed that this is a trial, of which two things are to be said; first, that it is for the most part some way off from the act of death, at an earlier period, and even before the agony; and secondly, that those who are thus visited, have been wanting in holy fear during their lives. It seems as if fear had a lesson to teach, which can only be taught on this side the grave, and that those, who will not spread it over their lives, must learn it by a vehement, hurried, and concentrated effort at the last. Indeed we may say, that there is nothing in life, which exercises a more blessed influence on death, than the prominence of holy lovinoc fear in our intercourse with God. Past fear is o the smoothest pillow on which the head of the dying can repose. With regard, then, to these temptations to despair, books tell us that they are deathbed temptations; but experience seems to show that they are exceedingly rare, except in that mitigated form which we have just mentioned as the penalty for over-familiarity and liberty with God. I have never seen an instance of real temptations to despair, and should not have men tioned them in this connection, except through a legitimate fear of differing from the consent of writers on the subject.

Then there is a class of temptations, which belong perhaps rather to the end of a serious illness than to death, but which so habitually tease the dying, that we cannot omit them. In the greater number of cases death follows upon an illness more or less long, an illness which has often worn threadbare our grace of endurance. Patience, even if it remain substantially in the soul, has put off its dignity, broken its silence, and taken to com plaining. Deep down in our hearts, the merciful penetration of God may satisfy itself that we are still con formed to His will, but our conformity has lost its gracefulness. When death ensues after a long illness, then these temptations, which in reality belong to the illness, seem to form part of the process of the deathbed, and it is the solemnity of our danger which gives to these temptations their peculiar vexatiousness. They are temptations to little sins, to sins which shame us by their unworthiness, and also make us suspect something greatly wrong in our inward dispositions because of their unfitness and unseasonableness. Among them we may reckon a temptation to greediness, to selfishness, to talking about self, to a greater amount of irritability than our sufferings will cover in the way of excuse, to uncharitable suspicions, to petulance with God, and to certain forms of untruthfulness. Who has not seen how often these things dishonour the sickbed, which is else giving evidence of so many graces and of so much presence of God? It may well be doubted whether the moral significance of these temptations is very considerable.

Nevertheless earnest men make fewer excuses for themselves when they come to die, than they were in the habit of making when they were in health. They know well how fatal it is for a sick man to be indulgent to himself. His friends are already running a risk of destroying him by their indulgence; he will be lost, if he is indulgent to himself. There is not a more universal characteristic of the saints, than their abhorrence of dispensations, growing as their need of them and right to them are growing also. Besides, the proximity of the intolerable purity of God, in which the dying lie, brings a light with it, in which little faults seem positively great ones. It is like faults in holy places or at holy times. A sense of sacrilege goes along with the other malice of the sin. To be greedy, for example, or to let a gust of anger make our voice shrill, when we are so awfully near God, this is sad misery. "When we stand round the beds of others, we rightly compassionate these things. When we lie there ourselves, and thus demean ourselves, our dispositions must rather be those of self-revenge than of compassion. In truth death is not a penance only; it is a humiliation also. We must bear as part of it this way in which the light of death illuminates the otherwise incredible frivolity of our serious immortal natures. Age has hidden our childishness; it has not changed it. Alas! years only took away the simplicity of youth; they abated little, if anything, of its childishness.

We have also to remember, in connection with the characteristic temptations of death, the especial assaults of the evil spirits which form perhaps an invariable part of the last struggle of every man. It is eminently the hour and the place of evil spirits, because it is also eminently the hour and the place of the divine compassions. But their assaults are not only more vehement and concentrated at that time, but are also of a kind peculiar to the occasion. This novelty springs from various causes; first of all, the evil spirits have reserved their worst attacks for the last, when the very novelty of them increases their likelihood of success, inasmuch as they take us by surprise, and out of the habits of our previous spiritual warfare. Then, again, there are temptations, which would hardly be tempta tions except to the dying, and these naturally make their first appearance at that time. Again, the opera tions of grace are frequently new in the sanctification of the dying; and the acuteness of the dark angels enables them to find new opportunities in new graces. Lastly, the vicinity of God gives a new force to all our motives, so that even old temptations come in a manner and with an intensity, which make them practically new. So far as we can judge from observation, it would not be true to say that the most vehement season of satanical assault in each man s life is his last battle on his dying bed. This is by no means the case. I should doubt if it were so even with the majority. But it is not unlikely to be so with a considerable number. It is at least one of the terrible capabilities of death. We ought all to expect, what is not improbable, that the assaults of the evil spirits at the hour of death may be out of all proportion to the temptations of our life. It is better to be ready, even for what may happen, when the risk is so tremendous, and can be run only once.

What is particularly to be observed, and also to be dreaded, in these final assaults of the evil angels, is their terrible fitness to our character. They are adapted to our weaknesses with almost inevitable skill. They yb ON DEATH.

are edged, proportioned, weighted, clothed, disguised, and surrounded with plausible circumstances, in such a manner that, if left to ourselves,, we must perish. But the vilest of God s reasonable creatures is never so little left to himself as when he lies down to die. He is never so importuned by mercy, so almost cumbered with assistance, as he is then. If we did not always see death as if it were an island in an ocean of grace, we could not think without dismay of the horrible dexterity of our spiritual enemies. Moreover death brings out our character, and lays it open in its whole breadth to the machinations of our unseen foes. Indeed character is often brought out for the first time in its ful ness and completeness by death. We sometimes see strange disclosures of this power in the deaths of children. Perhaps the souls of infants are as fullgrown as those of mature men, only their material instrument, the body, is not equal to the task of their develop em ent. Certainly many children s deathbeds look as if this were the case. Thus the Church sings of dear St. Agnes, the little martyr of thirteen, Infantia quidem computabatur in annis, sed erat senectus mentis immensa. If it were so, would it not throw light on tho mystery of baptism and its infused habits, and also invest children with a dignity which would influence us in their education? This may have been in the minds of those theologians, who held that children committed venial sins very early, and, dying in venial sin only, underwent a long purgatory because their parents never dreamed of their needing assistance.¹

With adults, at all events, there can be no doubt as to this amazing developement of character by death, nor of the opportunity which it affords to the evil spirits. Nevertheless we must remember also that these assaults of the evil angels seldom last quite up to the act of death. Satan delivers his battle at a somewhat earlier period, and then is bidden to draw his forces off, and there is peace. The actual end of most men is in peace, however the battle may have gone.

Finally, we must say of the temptations of death, as we said of its pains, that there are doubtless unknown and unimaginable ones, which no man has ever returned to tell us of. Those, who have been raised to life again by the saints, do not seem to have been allowed to make revelations. Their experience had perhaps been intentionally withdrawn from their memory. "What we can see for ourselves is this, and although it is but o an outside, it is much to see, that souls, who have had small experience of spiritual things in lifetime, are often put through vast experiences in the rapid pro cesses of death, which would have occupied } r ears in the slower successiveness of life.

So far we have only spoken of the unilluminatecl side of death, or at least the light which has been thrown upon it is but like the redness of a sunset on a bare seaside. But, if death has its characteristic pains and temptations, it has also its characteristic graces and joys. We will begin by considering its graces. Grace, like all heavenly things, is given to concealment. Its simplicity loves disguise, and its beauty is almost of too delicate a nature to arrest the eye. Thus we shall not be surprised, if, while tho pains and temptations of death stand out boldly and almost coarsely, the graces of death appear less prominent and occupy less room in the picture. There is one grace which seems to be hardly ever absent from Christian deathbeds. It is the grace of light. The intellectual self-sufficiency of the world, impersonated in all its grandeur in Goethe, may need to cry out in piteous anguish for light, " more light." It was the natural deathsong of the world-poet. But the humble believer is more likely to be bewildered with his light, than to need more. The stars grow brighter as the night darkens. As the lights of earth are put out one by one in the midnight of death, the countenance of heaven makes plainer and plainer revelations. From one point of view death is all darkness; from another it is a land of light. We see better than we did before. "We understand better. We recognize more surely what has to be done, and we perceive how to do it. Our increased knowledge of the sinfulness of sin brings with it a deeper hatred of it, and a more satisfactory contrition. Our nearer view of God raises the fervour i.

of our love. Faith seems almost to be changing its character, and begins to have something of sight in it, even while it continues to be strictly faith. We learn to judge ourselves beforehand with something of that searchingness, that remembrance, and that zealous purity, wherewith the All-holy is to judge us presently. Each doctrine of our faith, each mystery of our Blessed Lord, each saint and angel whom we have loved, shines out in the heaven above us like a new and magnificent luminary. Sometimes the light overflows the soul, whose profound recesses it has filled, and breaks out into actual sights, into flashes of celestial visions, into starry incursions of the impatient glory which is drawing the veil from behind, into sounds which scatter showers of light as they resound, into touches, tastes, and fragrances, which come to us in beams of light and make us give forth light ourselves. By means of all this light, common souls are often admitted then into the mystical world, who had in lifetime no antecedents whatever of the kind. It is true there are dark deaths, dark deaths which even saints have died, the aspect ot whose magnificence was all turned heavenward, so that we could not see it. But these are the rarest of deaths to the humble and penitent believer: and even then how glory-streaked is the darkness, how little like what we really mean by darkness, much more a pavilion of clouds in which the soul is invisibly caressed by God! All grace brings with it a supernatural heat, but some graces in a much greater degree than others, and the same graces more efficaciously at some times than others. There are often graces in life, which seem to be nothing but illumination. They enlighten the mind without appearing to touch the affections. They illustrate our duty without fortifying the will to do it. They are dry graces. No dew falls with them. So that there appear to be graces which have no unction, but only make a cold bright day in the soul. Sometimes this separation between the light and heat of grace may be real. More often it comes to pass from the uncongenial state of our own souls. A hard heart and a brio-lit o mind, who has not felt the unhappiness of this, if he has ever tried the spiritual life at all? But the graces of death seem to bring with them great heat, which makes them more than usually efficacious. It is as if we were standing nearer, as in truth we are, to the fountain of all grace, the eternal fountain of divino fire. God s love of us looks as if it grew more pitiful, more mother-like, because of our extreme necessity.

He pleads more, and threatens less. He entreats where He used to command. He kisses instead of speaking. He knows well that endearments have wrung Confes sions of guilt and sincere promises of amendment, from those whom no sternness, nor even pain, could have drawn to any such acknowledgment, much less inspire into them any such dispositions. The very circum stances of death league themselves auspiciously with this heat of grace. There is a pathos about everything, which melts ourselves, as well as the bystanders. Our physical weakness brings a facility of weeping, which I cannot think is altogether without its influence in softening the heart; for what physical thing about us is 071 ly physical? Thus the most trivial motives of love and sorrow tell upon us with a new force. The tenderness which we so often see in the dying, the intensity of their natural affections deepening almost as their absorption in God deepens also, the courtesy of those who were naturally abrupt, the softness of those who were cold and unimpassioned in manner, the gracefulness of those whose goodness never did itself justice from the want of being graceful, all these mello wings of character, these evening lights and shadows of the heart, which make us feel as if we had never adequately loved those whom we have most dearly loved, until they come to die, are the consequences and exuberances of that heat of grace which characterises a holy death.

There is a sense in which even the sacraments may be called characteristic graces of death. One of them, Extreme Unction, belongs of right to the act of dying, or to the proximate peril of it. But the same remark holds good of Confession and the Viaticum. ISTo one has ever yet fathomed the sacraments. We may confidently assert that a great residue of graces has escaped the penetration of the devoutest theologians. We can hardly magnify them over much. Alas! we must believe that not all sacraments administered to the dying are valid. The outward administration and the inward dispositions are not invariably conjoined. Nevertheless we cannot but believe that, on the whole, the administration of a sacrament is a strong probability in favour of its validity, strong enough to warrant that universal sense of the faithful, which leads them to think so hopefully of those who have died with the rites of the Church. It seems to belong to the providence of God that it should be so. If the honour of Jesus be dear to us, the honour of the sacraments must be dear to us also; for in nothing is He so much implicated. Moreover to the dying the special graces of the sacra ments appear to become more special. We express this when we call the Communion of the dying by the wonderful title of Viaticum. Has anv one, even the t/ * highest saint, ever taken out of any one sacrament the whole of the grace which it contained? Did any one ever in the longest life exhaust the treasures of his Baptism? It is the imperfection of our own dispositions, which puts limits to the sanctifying efficacy of the sacraments. But the dispositions of the dying are visibly quickened to a degree which amazes us, and are probably quickened in reality to an extent of which we have no conception, so that the sacraments sink into them like water in loose ground, and go down to an unusual depth.

The presence and assistance of our Lady, St. Joseph, the angels, and our patron saints, form a very world of grace, which is like an enchanted land. We have sounds from inside, and voices speaking, of such strange penetrating sweetness that they infold our spirits in wondering silence. We see light out of deep places, as it were the reflection of the lights of a great city on the ewarfchj clouds of night. The echoes of music come from afar, such music as must be to the dying like anticipations from heaven* Sometimes we neither hear nor see, but the dying themselves betray it in their broken talk, or we see it in their eyes like points of brightness without form or shape. Is there one of us, who does not expect to be in that world himself when he comes to die? Have not bargains passed between each of us and the inhabitants of heaven, in the fulfil ment of which we put more trust than in the honestest contract upon earth? This supernatural thronging of celestial beings round our deathbeds is another form of the love of God. It is full of graces; but what those graces are, or like to what, we do not know. The time will come when it will all be matter of fact to us, and it will make death such a glory and a sweetness, that it will be one of the pleasures of eternity to be perpetually cnlling it to mind.

As we have said of the pains and temptations, so also must we say of the graces of death, that there are others unknown and unimaginable, peculiar graces out of God s reserved treasury, for such as have believed and have not presumed. At that hour and in that act, faith gathers exotic graces of strange, marvellous, many-sided virtue. For what is death to the believer, but the falling, and in all falls there is a risk, into the hands of the unknown goodness of our God?

Last of all, we have to speak of the characteristic joys of death. This is a very interior world, into which we can hardly feel our way except by the actual sensibilities of death. Things are joys to the saints, which are not joys to us. Things are joys to us when we are more than commonly filled with the presence of God, which at ordinary times are not joys to us at all, perhaps even wearinesses. So doubtless there are many joys to the dying, which are joys to them because they are dying. As we approach death, if we approach it as Christians should, we begin to enter into the dispositions of the saints. God is more present to us perhaps than He has ever been in life, except on a few great occasions. Moreover the joys of earth have faded from us. They have ceased to be joys. It is irksome to think of them now, both because they are so unsuitable to our present state, and also because they have at this distance a look of waywardness, and childishness, and indeed almost of sin. We are more sensitive therefore to the touch of supernatural joy. For example, there belongs to our condition a partial inability to sin. There are many sins, which we can no longer commit, and many which we have no temptation to commit. This is like a faint beginning of heaven. It is enough to be a joy to us, that the mere possibilities of sin are on the move, that any capability of offending God has become dead already. It cheers us on. It melts our hearts. It is a fresh spring of love within us. To be unable to offend God a^ain, is part of a saint s desire of heaven. It comes near to disinterested love.

The past also, that fearful, fertile past, out of which we have seen all manner of chilling fears come forth, like clouds rolling in from the sea, it will become like a spice -island breathing its aromatic odours over the deep. Two things particularly in our past will give us joy. The first is our fear of God. The more of fear in life, the more of joy in death. O it is a happy thing to have feared God, to have feared Him exceedingly! It is at the last as if we had paid Him some fixed amount, and had to pay no more, of the tribute- of our fear, that clinging fear which, without ceasing to he fear, is a height of love as well, and now that fear could be fear no longer, but glided into familiarity. Every tremour of fear, which we have felt in life, seems to have earned a thrill of joy for us when we come to die. To love God is the beginning, middle, and end of all things. Yet somehow fear is sweeter to us in the

CD retrospect than love. Boldness frightens us when we come to die; and fear we see then was the wise humility of love. If we would die sweetly, let us fear God exceedingly. They, who have lived lives of fear, are the likeliest to die deaths of extatic love.

The other thing in our past, which is now a source of jubilee, is the confidence w r e have placed in God. That we have trusted Him, that we have trusted no one but Him, that especially we have not trusted ourselves, that we have tried to trust Him always and utterly, this it is which makes our soul sing songs in death, which might stop the world to listen, and ravish the spirits of the angels. We have known no reckonings up of merits. We have gloried in grace. We have dwelt on the sounding shores of the sea of the Precious Blood. We have thought great things of God s goodness. We have not known what it was to doubt His fidelity, or to demur to His decrees. We have flung ourselves under the march of His sovereignty. We have abandoned ourselves to His grandeur. We have loved the darkness of His ways, and begged Him not, in condescension to any weakness of ours, to destroy by indulgent brightness, the beauty of His night. So we have gone through life, while life was an unusual problem to us, so incurably full of joy, and yet so wearifully devoid of interest. It was always morning with us, morning in youth, morning in middle life, morning when middle life was past. All our life was morning. "We loved its brightness; but we wanted rest, and joy was not restful. We saw that with others it was evening early in life. How tranquil they seem, we used to say! Will it ever be evening-time with us? As God wills, so only it be never night, the night in which no man could work; for at least there is no rest, no Sabbath there! Thus we have lived lives without doubts, without ques tions, without strong wills, lives of confidence in God, a confidence so intimately part of ourselves that we have almost doubted whether it were natural or supernatural, swift, gushing lives, helplessly jubilant, almost persecuted by our own joy. This is what comes of confidence in God. But confidence and fear are almost one thing rather than two, when we speak of God. He that fears most, trusts most. He that trusts most, fears most. To none is death so little of a change, as to those whose life has been one long unbroken confidence in God.

Thus the present is a joy to us in our partial inability to sin, and the past is a joy to us in its retrospect of confidence and fear. Then there is another joy, which is partly of the present, and partly of the past. In our past lives we may have had many external faults. They might not be greatly culpable in the sight of God, but they were very offensive to others, and particularly discomforting to ourselves. We were beset with them, and nothing that we could do to cure them seemed to make any impression upon them. Whether God al lowed them in order to keep us humble, by hiding our gifts from ourselves as well as from others, we cannot tell. All we know is that they were a disagreeable cloud round us, and a standing shame, which led us to despise ourselves. They were often sins; but they were al ways littlenesses, even when they were not sins. Now suddenly they are gone, vanished, burned away in some insensible fire. It is not merely that the out ward opportunities of them are lacking to us. We feel that the things deep down in our character, which represented these faults, and were evidences of them, shadows cast by them, are gone also, and gone without warning, gone at once. We see this often in the deaths of the young. Death seems to do for them at once, what years of struggle would have failed to do. There is in them such an unclothing of faults, such a winning maturity of purified age. We could not have thought so much beauty of character could have comported with such external faults. But what a lesson is this to the living as well as a joy to the dying! What a world of the unsuspected truths of charity, and mysterious accuracies of ingeniously kind interpretations of conduct, does it not open out before us! It is as if purgatory Were visibly doing its work in the soul, while it yet lived on earth, so passive does the operation seem, and yet per formed with such amazing swiftness as belongs not to the slow imperceptible action of those unmeritorious fires.

The future too brings troops of joys, like angelic bands, to the djing bed. There is a joy which has to do with the present, yet lies on the confines of the future, and whose blessedness the past enhances as it were by contrast. It is the actual nearness of God. It is no slight bliss for one, whose spiritual life in years gone by has always taken the form of the worship of God s sovereignty, to find himself sensibly in the grasp of that resistless power. He trembles with exceeding fear. How can it be otherwise, with the nervous, puny, fragile creature, in so great a Hand, and with the fingers actually closing over him? Yet in his fear there is a breathless joy. He is on the verge now of learning by experience, that which hitherto has been but a sweet faith, how the omnipotence of God is the measure of His goodness. Through life he has been pushing his way to God, and the distance made him faint and down hearted. Now he is close to his attainment. All things round him are vibrating, because of the extreme vicinity of God. The strong earth is being unanchored, and is drifting away from under him, and underneath all is God. There is a trouble as of a coming earth quake, but it is in truth the approach of God. He comes as if He came from far, as if He were in haste, and must be gone again presently, and we feel His breath upon us in the dark, and in another moment He will have carried us away, almost into the distanca of immensity, and we shall have found a home some where in His illimitable power.

Then our joy becomes still more a thing of the future. We rejoice in the future hope of eternal company with Jesus. We do not distinguish among the various blessednesses of heaven. We see it all in indistinct unity, as contemplative souls see God in contemplation. Heaven is one thing, to be eternally with Jesus. We thought we had already had a great devotion to the Sacred Humanity in our lifetime; but then we find we have hardly known its sweetness, its loveliness, its dearness. Just as, when death beautifies the characters of those we love, we feel as if we had never known them before as they deserved, and as if till now we never suspected how much we should have to lose in losing them, so now the beauty of Jesus grows upon us like a glorious dawn; and though we have desired

Him and thirsted for Him all our lives, it is as if we had never known till now how much we were to gain in gaining Him. "Words cannot tell the novelty of Jesus to the dying. The joy of that novelty, what less can it he than part of the eternal amazement of our happy souls in heaven?

Then, last of all, there is a joy in death itself, which we cannot understand, because it is out of sight, an unexperienced joy. We know it from the dying. Perhaps there is some sweetness in the act of dying, heretofore unimagined, and coming to it from the fact that our Blessed Lord has died. Or perhaps it is a joy to us to find death all so much gentler than we had expected. Those last words of the great theologian, Suarez, always touch me deeply, when he looked up at the very last, and said, as if in some gratified surprise, " I never thought it was so sweet to die!" We think of those twenty-one closely-printed, double-columned folios, diffusive, exuberant, and full of unction, filled to overflowing with deep, and calm, and wise, and many-sided thoughts, of God and of the things of God. But one thought was not there, that should have been, one of deepest significance to men to know, and yet he had not attained thereto, one thought, unthought then, but of deeper significance than thousands of his others which we could ill spare, the one which was to be his last thought, and the crown of all his thoughts, his mind as he took the first step into eternity, " I never thought it was so sweet to die!"

The poets, then, were not so far wrong in their images of death. The summer sun shining on those motionless green billows of the grassy graveyard, the fragrance of the lime -flowers tranquilly depending in the windless air, the undersong of the bees in the biossoms, the quiet sky overhead so blue, and the spire pointing its untired finger up to the Throne of God, so softly curtained in the infinity of that yielding blue! These outward images were not without their inward truth for those who die their deaths w r ell by dying them in Christ. Deaths are being died somewhere every moment. But it is not a melancholy thought. Every hour, we feel it most at evening, it is like balm to our spirits to think of the busy benevolence of death, ending so much pain, crowning so much virtue, swallow ing up so much misery, pacifying so much strife, illuminating so much darkness, letting so many exiles into their eternal home and to the land of their Eternal Father! grave and pleasant cheer of death! How it softens our hearts, and without pain kills the spirit of the world within our hearts! It draws us towards Go:l, filling us with strength, and banishing our fears, and sanctifying us by the pathos of its sweetness. When we are weary, and hemmed in by life, close and hot and crowded, when we are in strife, and self-dissatisfied, we have only to look out in our imagination over wood and hill, and sunny earth, and starlit mountains, and the broad seas whose blue waters are jewelled with bright islands, and rest ourselves on the sweet thought of the diligent, ubiquitous benignity of death!

Footnotes

1. Arriaga torn. 3. disp. 10, n. 53. Also the- revelations of Elizabeth of Schonaug lib. 2. cap. 18. Also the life of Marina d Escobar ap Siurium. Tract vi. cap. 2. n. 12 and 13. And other writers who treat of the question of men dying in original and venial sin only. ↩