Preparation for Death

Life, as no one can doubt, is more important than death. If death has a great influence on life, the influence of life on death is still greater. In fact the work of death can only be done safely in life. There are exceptions, to snow how God can stretch His mercy, and also to magnify the efficacy of grace. But as the good life is worth nothing, so far as eternity is concerned, unless it is crowned by a good death, so a good death, though not impossible, is the exception where the life has not been good. Still, though an exception, it is possible, and therefore from one point of view we may say that death looks more important than life. Nevertheless it may only be a seeming; for who knows whether some good thing among much evil, something striven for and clung to, even where there appeared no signs of strife, may not be the secret cause of those prodigious interventions of grace, which occur some times in the deaths of sinners? Perhaps also such interventions have never happened to those who pre sumed upon them beforehand, and deliberately delayed turning to God through a profane confidence in the graces and opportunities of death. But the practical truth is that which teaches us at once the most sober and solemn view of life, that every single thing we do is actually making death either harder or easier.

Death, therefore, is not an isolated action. Time and eternity are riveted in it. Life is not secured without it. Eternity is ratified by it. This is obvious; for death is at once a part both of life and immortality. Yet men often speak as if preparation for death were a distinct spiritual exercise, and nothing more than that. They know of course that all life is a necessary preparation for death, but they do not realize it. They answer rightly when they are questioned, but the truth does not always rest clearly in their minds. Whether we think of death, or whether we forget it, whether we serve God, or neglect Him, life, in spite of us, is all the while a minute and detailed preparation for death. It seems almost absurd to dwell upon what is so plain. Nevertheless the too exclusive regarding of preparation for death as a distinct spiritual exercise is productive of much harm.

Whatever habits of thought tend to make death appear a thing by itself, a detached act, tend also to make strictness of life seem less needful. Insensibly, even men who are not sinners come to lay too much stress on death, and to consider it as a process for straightening crooked lives. They would shrink Avith horror from saying that a good death would do instead of a good life. Yet practically an idea with something of a similar spirit grows up in their minds, and lowers their standard of holiness, and lulls their vigilance, and relaxes their concentrated attention to the details of conscience. The very love of God helps to deceive them, when they have thus once begun to deceive themselves. The immensity of His graces in death, the wonders of His sacraments, the intervening jurisdiction of His Blessed Mother, and the authentic conversion of great sinners at that eleventh hour, throw a glory of its own round death, which cannot be denied, but which on the contrary our reverence must sedulously magnify as one of the characteristic abysses of the divine compassion. Rightly viewed, it is an incentive to greater strictness. Nothing makes strictness more attractive, or more imperative, than the evidences of God s love. In proportion as we love Him, we fear His justice. In proportion as we love Him, we appreciate His sanctity. But we know that there is no corruption more pestilent, than the corruption of that which is most excellent; and thus it comes to pass, that the malice of men has always found in the greatness of God s love a motive for presumption. But is the love less true? Or is it meant that we are to shut our eyes to it? Or are we to become unreal, and put away from our practice doctrines which belong to the theory of the faith? Is not all doctrine practical? Is it not the first use of dogmatic theology to be the basis of sanctity, while controversy is but its fiftieth or its hundredth use? He, who separates dogmatics from ascetics, seems to assert this proposition, The knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ was not meant primarily to make us holy, or this other maxim, that Holiness has no necessary dependence upon orthodoxy. While, there fore, we urge upon men the influence of life on death, we must not go too far, nor put out of view those signal graces by which God appears sometimes to contradict our teaching. As I said before, Rightly viewed, they are incentives to strictness, not pretexts for presumption. There may be excuses for inadvertent souls, of which in our narrowness we have no idea, and to them the extraordinary graces of death may come. But we are in the light of the Holy Ghost, under the empire of grace, with a conscious inward life, and more or less of sweet experience of God, what have we to do with those strange awakening graces at the last? They will cheer us in our present penances: but they will throw no soft hopeful shadows over our present negligence.

All life then is a preparation for death, whether we think of it or not, quite independently of any intention of our own; a preparation as ceaseless and inevitable as the currents of thought, speech, and action, which, noisily or silently, are flowing from us at all hours. There are thus three kinds of preparation for death. The first is the entire series of life, which is actually and efficaciously preparing for us, according to common rales, the sort of death we are to die. Everything we do will turn round and face us at the last, as well as follow us over the grave to judgment. Of this preparation we have said enough. The second is the conscious and intentional fashioning of our lives generally, with a view to death, with a deliberate reference to its last end; and the third is what we may call the special preparation for death, consisting of particular spiritual exercises, retreats, and penances, which have death for their exclusive object. Something more remains to be said of the second, or general, preparation for death, before we can consider the third, or special, preparation.

It is the way of worldly people to make too little of death. The bravery of life seems to them a nobler thing. It is a greater power, and power is the object of their admiration. It is the genius of literature to abhor the imagery of death. The thought of death tends to make men timorous, and selfish, and little. There is an amount of truth in all this. There is a certain want of grandeur in religious details. Spirituality keeps us sorely down among our corruptions. A positive precept seldom has an imposing aspect, and obedience to it will often look trivial and unworthy.

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Nevertheless preparation for death can hardly avoid being one of the occupations of life, and an occupation stretching over a great deal of its surface. Death is an unknown act. It happens only once. It is inevitable and necessary. There is a universal uncertainty in everything connected with it. Yet everything is infallibly fixed by it to all eternity. These are the com monplaces of death; and every one of them is a sufficiently cogent argument for the wisdom of making all life a general preparation for death. It is plain our preparation must be general as well as special, remote as well as proximate. To make all life a special and proximate preparation for death would, in most cases, be not only unpractical, but incompatible with the highest purposes of life. Yet a conscious general preparation should be lifelong and unintermitting.

There are degrees in this general preparation. In some souls it occupies more room than in others. This may depend upon natural disposition, or it may depend upon a peculiar attraction of grace, or it may depend upon the degree to which providence has encompassed our lot in life with unbroken or successive sorrows. Certainly with some, this lifelong preparation for death becomes the peculiar form of their whole spiritual life. When this arises either from natural character or from besetting sorrow, it ought to be altogether disallowed. It is not an authentic spirituality. It plays into the hands of sentimentality. It degenerates into mere moody, luxurious, selfindulgent dramatizing of what is far too serious to be played with as a depth of feeling or an interesting pathos. There are very few, to whom such a form of devotion is at all suitable; and while the characteristic of it, where it is the instinct of grace, is its safety, on the other hand its peculiarity, as a growth of disposition or a consequence of sorrow, is precisely its unsafeness. Xo one therefore must choose it for himself as the one form of his whole spiritual life. When self-chosen, it is most likely to prove a delusion, leading to laxity by unmanning us for all real penance. There is no vigour in uncheerful penance, no cheerfulness in penances which nature seeks, and no penance at all in the indulgence of heaviness and gloom.

But there are some whom the Holy Ghost seems to call to this manner of the spiritual life. They are mostly souls of a grave cheerfulness, often with a natural turn for humour, and distinguished by active habits rather than contemplative. The spirit which is formed in them leads them to rest long, often for their whole lives, in the exercises of the purgative way, even when the deepest part of their soul is in the unitive. It is perhaps this tendency which makes such a form of spirituality so peculiarly safe, and as exempt, as any fashion of spirituality can be, from the entanglements and mockeries of delusion. It leads men also to make much of faith, of the gift of faith, and of the common things of the faith. This is not only another source of safety, but it also forms in us a childlike spirit, which is an earnest of many graces, of the higher as well as of the lowlier sort. Finally, this method of spirituality causes us peculiarly to cultivate the fear of God, and to find largo room and free space for our souls in the exercise of the examination of conscience. For examination of conscience, where it ministers to liberty of spirit, which it is far from doing in all cases, is one, of those compendious spiritual exercises which of itself can make saints. There is plainly a gravity, a solidity, a security, about this form of the spiritual life, which is much to be admired. Nevertheless wo must remember, that all this is only true of it, when, it is a genuine attraction of grace, a vocation and not a choice.

We shall best understand in what particulars the general preparation for death consists, by drawing a picture of the kind of life which usually meets its punishment upon the deathbed, and in the penal regions beyond. We need not speak of a life of open sin, whether of rebellion against God, or of worldly inadvertence of Him. Such a life speaks for itself, tells its own tale, explains itself, and is intelligible at first sight. We will take a life which is a very ordinary type, a life of considerable efforts after good, of decent frequentation of the sacraments, of an unevenly conscientious discharge of relative duties, of very rare mortal sin, and of a struggle to keep in a state of grace, which, if not unintermitting, is at least the rule rather than the exception. We may hope that such a life will end in salvation. We cannot do more than hope, but we have great grounds for hope. This life must be our lowest type. But there are other types which improve upon this, some more and some less; and all these we may include in our description. Now there are sundry features in these lives which are visible foreshadowings of trouble at the last, of disconsolate deathbeds. In truth, we the survivors should have need to be disconsolate if such lives ended without trouble, or issued in undoubting calm, and, still more, if they ended in triumphant assurance. Each of the lives will not present all the aspects; it is enough if it has some one or more of them.

The first thing we observe in such men is their hike-warmness. Lukewarmness is a thing which has many degrees, ranging from nearly hot to nearly cold; and the men we are speaking of are generally in some one of these intermediate degrees. They have their seasons of fervour. AVho has not? But their own acknow ledgment about themselves is, that, as a rule, they are tepid, below the mark in devotion and practice, more or less annoyed by religion, making themselves much at home in the world, and feeling, in spite of a higher feeling, that, after all, supernatural things are but an inevitable intrusion. These feelings do not in themselves constitute lukewarmness; but they do constitute it when unresisted, and unfought against. It is not however necessary to be at our ease under them in order to be lukewarm; it is sufficient that we succumb, however uneasilv, and succumb for some consi-

7 i/ derable length of time. Uneasiness is no consoling proof that we are not really lukewarm. Then again, such men are careless with the sacraments. They make but a perfunctory preparation for confession.

Their examination of conscience is hardly adequate, and, which is a more serious matter, they take but little pains with their sorrow, and less with their purpose of amendment. Sorrow for venial sins requires a good deal of looking after. Besides this, they make little, if any, preparation for communion, and that little is of a formal and spiritless kind; and the character of the thanksgiving is the same as that of the preparation.

furthermore, these men are much given to wasting time. Wasting time is the fault of almost numberless varieties of lives. Nearly every man has his own way of wasting time. Idling, dawdling, frittering, gossiping, dreaming, procrastinating, sleeping, recreating, playing with our work, trivial activity, these are only some of the commoner forms of wasting time. Yet wasted time is a vengeful thing, and stings terribly at the last. It diminishes the chances of a successful end. The less criminal forms of worldliness find acceptance also in the lives we are considering; and worldliness is at the least spirit-wasting in the forms in which it is most innocent, if indeed in any form it be innocent at all. Changeableness in devotions, and a general want of system in the spiritual life, is another characteristic of these lives. Many things may be said of this; but it is only our business now to enumerate it as one of the thinsfs which strew deathbeds with thorns. Selfishness, and want of almsgiving, and that common fault of selfwilled eccentricity in almsgiving, these also disquiet men at last, disquiet them when they are almost sickening with the desire of peace. Last of all, there is a want of penance in such lives, which is laying up terrible things for the end. Some time or other, penance will find us out. He is truly an unhappy man whom it finds out for the first time at the last. Under the head of penance we should specially include the keen appreciation and habitual indulgence in very little bodily comforts, the having many things in the day which are half necessary to us, and the absence of which ruffles and deranges us. He that is a slave to Lilliputian comforts will find a giant behind the curtains of his deathbed, who is not unlikely to strangle him in the weakness of that hour of retribution. ]STow a life the opposite to all this is what may be termed a life of general preparation for death, a life which has avoided on the whole these seven things, Itikewarmness, careless sacraments, waste of time, worldliness, changeableness in devotions, selfish scantiness of almsgiving, and want of penance. These are the seven prophecies of unquiet and distressing deaths, deaths that may end well, but deaths that run fearful risks in coming to their end. To hang the whole weight of our eternity over the precipice of death is not courage: it is madness.

If the material world is beautiful for its wisdom and its power, the spiritual world is yet more beautiful for its mercy and its compassion. But there are some mysteries, which are apparently exceptions to this rule of predominant mercy, mysteries of vindictive justice, not the less full of the shining of the Divine Perfec tions, but which we cannot admire with the same peace, because they overawe our souls. To feed undismayed upon the beauty of God s justice is a bliss reserved for another state. Our fear for ourselves and our love for others alike impede the full course of that heavenly joy in our present condition. Yet we must not omit to study these mysteries of justice, merely because they are so full of doubt and fear. In truth, the fear of God can be seldom abused so as to do us grievous harm, and almost all of us stand more in need of fear than of love, though our need of both of them is sadly great. We shall be least secure against these visitations happening to ourselves, if we wilfully refuse to contemplate them. The terrible mystery, at which I am now hinting, is the bad deaths of those who have once been good, and good for the greater part of their lives, sometimes good almost up to the end. Theophilus Ilaynaudus has a treatise in his works with the hideous title of " A bad death after a good life." It proves to be a commentary on the history of Judas. Now this is a phenomenon in the science of death, which we must needs consider. Mercy has its good deaths after bad lives, its deathbed repentances, its snatching of great sinners out of the yery jaws of the fire, those sudden and to our eyes capricious interventions of grace which seem to encourage the presumption of inconsiderate beholders, but which, to the eye of reverent faith, one while magnify the sovereignty of grace, another while illustrate the empire of the Mother of God, another while illuminate the grandeur of the gift of faith, or yet another while light up as by a flash the incredible abysses of the divine compassion and predestination. So in like manner the jealousy of God, the sharpness of His vindictive justice, have these bad deaths which follow lives of so much good. "We must now enquire into these terrific mani festations.

First of all, it is obvious to remark that these lives have been seemingly good rather than really good. Judas, they say, had a secret fault corroding all his life, and this is a sufficient explanation of his awful fall. I fear the matter is not so easily settled as this. No one surely can doubt of Judas having had a true vocation to the apostleship, considering that our Lord Himself called him, and conferred that office upon him. Yet it was a dignity and a grace unequalled, except by the Divine Maternity, the wardenship of St. Joseph, and perhaps the office of the Precursor. What gifts and virtues, what inward beauties and rare heroisms, are not implied in this vocation to be one of the Incarnate Word s selected twelve! Yet how terrible the end! Again, it may be urged that this is only saying, that a good life without perseverance is unavailing.. Only saying! But, alas! how many say this, and do not realize the tremendous doctrine it contains! A man may give up all that is bright and attractive in the world. He may wed himself to the almost insufferably dull work of the priesthood, a work of unintermitting toil, of predomi nating failure, of unthanked weariness, of responsibilities so many and so hard that they are for ever accumulating sin, and full of possibilities and occasions of falling, from which he would otherwise have been free. He may per severe in this course blamelessly, mark the word, blamelessly, for fifty years, the jubilee of his priesthood; and then he may fall, and death leap out of its ambush upon him while he is fallen, and behold I he is the hopeless victim of eternal ruin. We need not say more of this, than that it is a theological possibility. It is enough that it is so much as that. Certain appalling revelations of the saints make it more than this. They give names and dates, and speak of facts; and their look of authenticity is intolerable. It is more than curious, too, that intellectual wisdom should have been the distinguishing gift of some of those examples, which history puts before us, of deaths that look so nearly hopeless that we cannot think of them without dismay. Witness Solomon, Tertullian, Origen, and Hosius, those startling monu ments which mercy has bidden justice raise in sight of the wayfarers of the earth. It may also be said, and we cling to the thought, that sometimes these deaths are temporal and not eternal punishments, as with the man of God in the Old Testament, whom the lion devoured. There are some probabilities, and an asserted vision, of Solomon s salvation; and Benedict XIV. tells us that no one s perdition seems undeniably predicted in Scripture, so as to come near being a matter of faith, except that of Saul.

Nevertheless, when we have made the best of it, what remains is horrible enough. The mere fact that such deaths are theological possibilities, that it does not belong, as far as we can see, to the providence of God to hinder them, and that the saints speak of such deaths as having actually happened, is full of teaching, which we had better learn. Our eternity depends on the state in which we are when we die. Thus, the words are great words to say, a bad life with a good death is secure, while a good life with a bad death is perdition. The hour of death, its time, manner, and circumstances form one of the most, perhaps positively the most, decisive of God s providences upon us. I should not have dared to say this, was I not confident that in what has gone before I have guarded against the possibility of falsa consequences being deduced from it. "We can hardly conceive that these bad deaths after good lives are common; but we are left in uneasy ignorance as to how common they may be. It is true we knew beforehand that we were to pass the time of our sojourning here in fear. It is true we know that such a death must be altogether our own fault in not corresponding to grace. Every man has far more, not only more but far more, grace given him than is enough to save him. Nevertheless a fearful mystery is involved in so dire a dispensation, whichever of the three classes of persons, to whom it may happen, we regard. Look at men who have been really mortified and good for years, and have not persevered, or at men who have been under delusions all along, and have come at last not to be able to distinguish between delusions and the truth, or again at men who have begun well, and who have not more than an unquiet suspicion that they have got into a rut of slovenliness, of tepidity, of formal sacraments, of infrequent prayer, and of taking liberties with God; and lo! they have not strength to fight through the last hours, and to hold on to the edge of heaven, but fall fluttering into the sheer abyss. We live in a world which has such things amongst its phenomena. Surely we are fools, if our lives are not such as to take these things into account.

But these awful visitations have their roots and origin in our own conduct. What has been described above as general preparation for death would infallibly secure us against them. If we could be allowed to see one of these startling deaths with all its antecedents laid bare, so that we might trace its fibres and ramifications, we should see how one of them began on one day under certain circumstances, and another on another day at such and such a place and in the company of such and such a friend. These were little indistinguishable beginnings, thread-like, feeble, turned aside by the least obstacle, which an ejaculation would have withered or an absolution snapped, and behold! now they are huge roots of death! They were not watched; they were not checked. Here is a carelessness about little things, which began one summer holy day years ago. Here is an interruption of examination of conscience, which took place in an illness, and the practice was not resumed afterwards, and hence a want of self-knowledge. Here we came out of a trial, and brought with us a shadow of a spirit of selftrust, and it has waxed to something colossal, something like the sin of Lucifer. There was an enjoyable time at the seaside with a large circle of free conversation, and there we slipped into a habit of criticizing others, and hence these mortal sins against charity. It often struck us, as we read books, to pray especially for the gift of final perseverance. But we never did so. How were we to know that that transient thought was an angel s bidding, or a pleading of the Holy Ghost? Yet who can tell the irreverence of making sore of one of God s greatest gifts, without so much as taking the trouble specially to ask for it? We have been fostering some secret fault, like Judas. But its beginnings were in an unworthiness, which was hardly sin. We knew we had better not do it, and we did it. How few persons think themselves at all covetous! Yet surely more than half of those, who live in the world, have some tendrils of that subtle idolatry twining round their hearts. It is one of those vices of which the unlikeliest-looking souls are often the likeliest to be guilty. Insensibly we have acquired the habit of taking our own advice and acting on our own opinion. Who could have believed that the things should have come of it, which have come of it? We have thought, alas! how many rich people seem to think so, that almsgiving was a counsel, and not a precept; and mercy now is absent from the last end of those, from whose lives works of mercy have been absent. Who thinks himself a hypocrite? Surely we have not been hypocrites. Yet all through life we have been deficient in thorough sin-

O o eerily with God. So the divine mercy is wandering somewhere over the earth, or is perhaps lingering somewhere with the head of some dying lifelong sinner in its lap, and is not here, where we are dying; indeed it is almost everywhere but here, ubiquitous, yet not in cluding in its ubiquity the death-chamber of us who once served God, who once had spiritual sweetnesses, who once were encompassed with the softly -glowing siprns of predestination, and who now are dying, and are going whither we have unfortunately made too sure that we could never go I From all this, general preparation for death would have saved us. Light is a responsibility. The brighter our light, the deeper is the darkness which our light will make, if we turn it into darkness. It is o 7 the old, the simple, and the sufficient truth, if we do not take pains, and great pains, and persevering pains, there will be cruel darkness round us in the hour when we shall most need light.

We have still to consider what is called special preparation for death. This is one of the most satisfactory predictions of final perseverance; and has always entered deeply into the spiritual life of holy men. This special preparation consists of a variety of pious ex ercises having a direct reference to death, and to the obtaining the grace of dying holily. First of all, it is obvious that this must be the subject of special prayer. There are few prayers which may be unconditional. St. Philip used to say there was only one prayer that he always made without.any condition it was that unborn children might live to come to the grace of baptism. In like manner we may pray unconditionally to die in the faith and fear of God. We may do so, because death is so great an act, because it is certain to be God s will it should.be well done, and because the Church teaches us so to do. Every Hail Mary contains a prayer for a good death, and among other things included in the final petition of our Lord s Prayer, who can doubt but that a good death is not among the least significant? It would not be hard to show that each separate petition of the Our Father is in itself a prayer for a holy death. If final perseverance is a grace apart, and not merely the last link of a chain, which happens to come last in order of time, and if it is a grace we cannot merit, it must necessarily be part of the fear of God to make such perseverance the subject of daily and special prayer.

There are also certain outward practices, which saintly men have been in the habit of using for this end. Among these we may enumerate some act or ejaculation on lying down to rest, which is the daily similitude of death, formal acts of acceptance of death as a divine penance, made from time to time, meditation on the Four Last Things, and an occasional day s retreat for this express purpose. One. of these practices I would venture emphatically to recommend. It is the frequent repetition of the Acts of the three theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, with great attention paid to the exciting of the requisite interior dispositions along with the orthodox form of words. To these should be added Acts of contrition. "We are apt to acquit ourselves with a sort of facile formality of that which we do so often that it comes to be almost mechanically done. This is the chief difficulty in saying the Divine Office. Portions of it slip off our tongues more swiftly almost than thought, so that it speeds away like the unnoticed sand in the hourglass, less under our control than we should wish it to be. These Acts of faith, hope, charity, and contrition have visibly a special power at death. To one used to them in life, and not used to them as a mere fragment of catechism, they are next door to priest and sacraments. If we trust to them as mere fractions of catechism they will be worse than unhelpful. The thing to be aimed at is the habitual advertence to the interior dispositions at the time we pronounce the words.

There are some practices mentioned in spiritual books, which at the least cannot be universally or indiscriminately recommended. They are such as these: laying ourselves out in bed like corpses for a few moments, assisting in spirit at our own funeral, going mentally through the ceremony of our own Extreme Unction. Souls are so very different, that we can never say of anything which a good man has recommended, that it will not be good for other souls. We cannot too often remember that the only approach to a general rule in spiritual direction is, that there is no general rule in the matter. Eules, which seem the most general, are no more than approximations. But I confess my instincts are against these dramatic representations. I should be so afraid of their turning into sentimentality, and of men being made unreal by thus playing at death. Death surely has empire enough over the imagination. It is something else than the imagination which needs kindling, in connection with that dread mystery. I say this diffidently; for Bellecius strongly recommends some practices of this kind. For myself, I found that they distracted me from the thought of God, and did not make me serious. Yet Bellecius is especially a solid writer.

We considered, at the beginning of this Conference, that form of the spiritual life, which resolves itself wholly into preparation for death. There is something akin to this in special preparation for death. Besides formal practices for this end, we may dwell upon certain parts of the spiritual life, and give them a certain degree of prominence, with a particular reference to death. But these things neither occupy the whole breadth of our spirituality, nor are unintermitting exercises. We allow a special reference to death to impart certain characteristics to our spirituality. One of these is that recommended in Scripture, To be always afraid of forgiven sin. This gives a great solidity to virtue. Abiding sorrow for sin is one of the safest gran deurs of holy souls. A single caution may be required. This sorrow should be for the most part general, not too much descending into particulars, for fear of scruples which always make the will languid. There is some thing very satisfactory about a soul which is charac terized by this fear of forgiven sin. Another interior practice is, making death a light to live by, or, in other words, doing everything as we shall wish to have done it when we come to die. This exercises a salutary influence over our examinations of conscience, and our preparations for confession. We perform these" duties each time as if it was to be the last time. Things done in that spirit are for the most part done well. In like manner other parts of the spiritual life may be made to bear especially on death. The rule to be observed is briefly this, to dwell on whatever leads us to make less of the physical terror of dying, and more of what ever renders death transparent and shows us God beyond. We may lawfully be afraid to die because it is a punishment: but it would be better if we could fear it exclusively as settling for ever our relationship to God.

Then again there are certain things which it is devout to do for a hundred other reasons, but which have a special virtue with regard to death. In proportion as we fear death, we shall naturally lay stress on these things, and give them a prominence in our practice. For instance, it is obvious that charity to the dying, praying daily for those who are in their agony all the world over, and performing personal works of mercy to them when it is in our power, are special preparations for our own death. Blessings beget their own kind of blessings. In natural things one kindness brings a like kindness. Still more in divine things do blessings roam

O o the world in groups and families, making much of their own kindred. The same may be said of charity to the souls in purgatory, especially by selfsacrificing generosity in the matter of Indulgences. There is something in both these devotions, which is congenial to a happy and a holy death.

Lastly, there are two things which are still more special in the way of preparation for death. The first is an habitual looking to the Most Holy Mother of God as having a very peculiar and distinct jurisdiction over deathbeds. The Church points this out to us again and again, in hymns and antiphons, as well as in the Hail Mary. The revelations of the saints, the teaching of devotional writers, and the universal sense of the faithful, unite in proclaiming the power which God has given her in this particular respect. Some have spoken of it as the reward which Jesus has bestowed upon her for her heroic presence with her broken heart on Cal vary. Others have said that it belonged to her as queen of mercy, because the hour of death is so wonderfully mercy s hour. All agree that deathbeds form a department of the Church, if we may speak so familiarly, which belongs to her officially. We should therefore be out of harmony with the Church, if this consideration did not practically enter into our devotion to our Blessed Lady. The experience of all, who grow in holiness, is that they grow also in tenderest devotion and deepest reverence for our Blessed Mother. We are always learning her anew, and so beginning to love her, as if what we had felt for her before was hardly worthy of the name of love. As the rest of our devotion to her grows, so also must our dependence on her aid in our last hour grow within our hearts. We shall pray to her more fervently about it. We shall make com pacts with her, to which we shall assume her consent, that either by herself or by her angels she will fortify us by her presence at that dread moment. We shall entrust our fears to her, and leave to the management of her maternal solicitude every one of those circum stances of death, the very least detail of which is to us of such surpassing interest.

The second thing I alluded to is perpetual thanks-

ISO ON DEATH.

giving for the death of Christ. All holy deaths come out of His. If He had not died, how. should we dare to die? He is the Creator. He invented the punishment of death. He also must suffer it. It was His own law of love. He has enlarged the gates of death, and hung lamps over them. It is strange how the elder saints dared to die. No wonder they speak of it so awfully, as if it led into such terrible darkness, and looked like an end of all things, almost like an extin guishing of immortality. Great was their faith, these old patriarchs, kings, and prophets. But how different is death to us! Christ has died. A new creation were surely a less change. As death was the peculiar punishment invented by God for sin, so was the death of our Lord, precisely His death and nothing else, the peculiar price exacted by the Father for the redemption of the world. Thus the death of Jesus is the life of every one of us. "VYe live because He died. How marked a feature, then, in all our prayer must be thanks giving for the death of Christ! It must be, if such a thing could be, the universal special devotion of all Christians. Moreover it was by His death that we succeeded to His Mother, as our inheritance. Thus the death of Jesus is entwined with our deaths. Thanksgiving for His deatli is the best prayer for our own. As the Father fixed precisely on His death as the price of our salvation, so must our devotion fix precisely on His death, as the object of our love and praise.

We have said enough of preparation for death. Men s faces looking into a sunset are golden: so are our lives when they look always into the countenance of coming death.