A Death Precious in the Sight of God

The union of fear and desire is a beautiful worship, modestly befitting the creature, and reaching with venturous reverence to the perfections of the Most High. To have no fear of God is to be, not only without love of Him, but without knowledge of Him also. To be without the desire of God would be almost worse than to rise against Him through despair of reaching Him, as the reprobate do in their hopeless land. God is jealous of this desire. We read of a very holy Jesuit, that he revealed to his companions that he had been detained for some time in purgatory, because in his death the desire of God had not been sufficiently prominent. In the fourth book of St. Bridget s Revelations she mentions, that she was shown a third region of purgatory, where there was no pain of sense, but only the pain of loss; and she was told that souls were impri soned there, who in lifetime had not had an ardent desire of God. In the same book she also tells us, that, when she was praying for the soul of a certain hermit, who had recently died, our Blessed Lady appeared to her, and told her that he would have entered heaven immediately, if he had not been wanting in the vehemence of his desire of God. St. Mechtildis, in the fifth book of her Spiritual Grace, speaks of the same region of purgatory, where there is only the pain of loss, the pain arising, as a soul detained there -described it to her f, from the very burning of that intolerable desire which had been so cold and remiss in life. This union there fore of fear and desire is especially to be looked for in the matter of death. Not to fear death is a slight to Him who made it our special punishment. Not to desire death is an indifference to Him, whom we can only reach by passing through it.

There are some who are haunted by a fear of death. Its physical horrors are continually before them. They dread the pain. They shrink from the darkness. This fear rises at times almost to a panic. It has often had its rise in some circumstance of early life, or in some defect of early teaching. It is sometimes the result of morbid nervousness. But this is not the fear of death to be cultivated. No good comes of it. To be scared is not to be afraid with any reasonable or fruitful fear. No fear is a godly fear which fastens so intensely on the physical pains of death. Then there is another fear of death, which belongs to those who are not right with God, and who are procrastinating, if not their repentance, at least the ir fervour; as if there were, or could be, such a thing as procrastinated fervour! It is not the bodily pains of death which frighten these men. It is the uncertain issue. It is the being reluctantly dragged up to the settlement of a question, which it is the crying sin of their lives to leave unsettled. The theology of death is all a blind mist to them. They can see nothing more than it is a dark leap into the awful unknown, the outer chaos which to men who do not meditate seems to girdle the world of matter and sense. Plainly there can be no sanctification in such a fear as this. Tho fear of death which is desirable, the fear of it which is almost indispensable to holiness, is rather the fear of God than the fear of death, the fear of God localized as in a shrine, determined to a particular time, as if it were a ritual in which He would make some dread but gracious manifestation of Himself. This fear is full of grace, and is hardly capable of excess. This is what we are to aim at. This is the fear which glorifies deathbeds, the be^innin^ of that extatic fear o * o o which makes the angels tremble so blissfully before the Throne.

But there is an ordinary, natural, simplehearted, Christian fear of death, which is lower than this, and is not only blameless, but full of materials for good. Sober piety cannot be without this fear. The old must fear death, because it is so near. Its shadow is already on them, and they shiver because the sunshine is inter cepted. The expectation even of a coming good becomes a painful fear, when the event is close at hand. The young fear death, because preparation for it is so uncongenial to their habits of thought and time of life. They dwell in brightness, and they have not proved yet how thin and wan a shining earthly brightness is. Experience has not told them yet how really autumnal is the very spring of youth. The sinner fears death, because his penance is not done yet; and the preacher only irritates him when he says, that the longer death is delayed the less likely is he to die repentant. The lukewarm fear death with an instinctive, almost prophetic fear, both because to them the act itself is so often terrible and doubly penal, and because such souls so easily make final shipwreck there. The good fear it, because the risk is so much the more anxious, now that the prize seems the more possible. We strain hardest for things which are almost but not quite within our reach. Moreover humility always calculates against itself, and therefore a slight exaggeration in the fear of death is almost a feature in true devotion. Some men do not fear death, some even of good men, of men more than good, coming near to the saintly. Such a disposition may be a work of grace. Grace is many-sided, and works by means of opposites with astonishing facility. Yet this absence of the fear of death is extremely undesirable, and greatly to be suspected. It is not unlikely to be a delusion; and if it is a delusion, it is one of peculiar danger. This fearlessness can only be safe when it belongs to great heights of sanctity. We should pray hard not to be of those who do not fear death; for such souls, with common attain ments, are not easy to be saved.

But from the fear of death let us turn to the desire of it. What we have said of the fear of death we may say also of the desire of death, only we should say it still more emphatically, that the desire which is part of holiness must be rather a desire of God, than a desire of death. World- weariness is a blessed thing in its way, but it falls short of being a grace. To be weary of the world is very far from being detached from it. I am not sure that there is not a weariness of the world, which is itself a form of worklliness. World- wearied men often think and speak of death in a poetical, voluptuous way, which is most ungodly. They talk as if the turf of the churchyard were a bed of down, as if the grassy ridge were a pillow on which to lay our tired heads and slumber, and as if the grave were a cradle in which we should be rocked to sleep as the earth swayed, and so voyage unconsciously through space, like a sleeping child in a ship at sea. None but atheists could speak thus of death, if those who so speak really weighed their words. Such men habitually regard death as an end, and not as a beginning. It has been observed of intellectual men, that such talking of death is often a symptom of incipient mental aberration. It is certainly true that happy men more often desire death than unhappy men, and desire it more strongly, and tha their desire is more truthful and more holy. An unhappy man desires death rather than God. He desires it with a kind of heathen despondency. He quotes the Odyssey and the ^Eneid. The pathetic imagery of those poems is more congenial to him than the straightforward realities of Christian theology. He fixes his eye morbidly on death; but he is anxious it should not look over death and beyond it. Whereas a happy, lighthearted, sunny-spirited Christian man, who has no quarrel with life, except its possibilities of sinning, some how feels its burden more than the unhappy man, who clings to life with a sort of morose, sulky enjoyment. Yet, while the happy man feels its burden, his happiness inclines him to be eager for beginnings rather than to be impatient for conclusions. Thus death is to him less the end of life, than the beginning of eternity. He desires God rather than death; for it is the gift of a joyous heart to find short ways to God from the most unlikely places.

The desire of death, then, may be a great grace, and imply very much. But it must be when the soul is really athirst for God, and only looks wistfully at death as the portal it must pass to reach Him, just as an impatient traveller sees nothing but the mountain-pass or the harbour-mouth. Yet this desire may also be a delusion, and often is so. In those who are actually dying it may be a physical effect of exaltation from drugs, or a kind of inebriety of fear. In these cases we do not like to see it in those we love, but fortunately it has not much of a moral character about it. It is rather one of the dishonours of our flesh, one of those indigni ties of dying, from which so few deathbeds are entirely free. In the case of the living, the best test " of the desire of death is the one already given, namely, whether it is rather God than death that we desire. At the same time it is perfectly lawful to desire freedom from pain, to sigh for rest, to long for deliverance from cares and responsibilities, to be weary of sorrow and weary of endurance, and, above all these things, to yearn for the inability to sin. But then these wishes must not be all, nor by themselves. They must coexist with the desire of God, and that desire must be sovereign and predominant. Of course it were better if God alone were our desire. This is what we must covet; but we are speaking now of what is safe and lawful. One remark, however, applies to all desire of death it must invariably be mixed with fear. A moment will come, and it oftenest comes some time before death itself, when, if the desire has been from God, Pie will Himself withdraw the fear. Men do not often seem to be afraid in the very act of dying. Either there is an unexpected facility in dying, or a peculiar grace. Fear leaves even the most timorous, before the moment comes in which they have most to fear. These then are two gifts which we should long for, the fear of death and the desire of death. It is not likely they should ever be equally balanced in any soul; but for my own part, calculating all things, I would rather the fear should predominate over the desire. Perhaps the two dispositions have their appointed hours, and it may be that the one flows when the other ebbs. If it is so, we may be sure that the high-tide of our desire is fixed by the high-tide of our fear. He will desire most who has feared most. Of all saving things, fear, if it is not the most fertile, is at least the most undeluding.

Assuming then that we have rightly and safely both feared death and desired it, let us next consider what we look like when we are dying. What are the phe-

/ o * nomena which we exhibit to the eye of God, as well as to those who are mourning round us? It is plain that God sees much more than men see, much more than we ourselves are conscious of; and this last is far more than men see. It appears to be one of the trials of the dying that they cannot make themselves under stood. In death, as at other times, the penetration of God is on the whole in our favour. He sees our evil as men cannot see it; but then He sees also the infirmity of a created nature, as creatures themselves can never see it. He perceives extenuations where men either perceive them not, or mistake them for aggravating circumstances. On the whole therefore God s know ledge is on our side; and the purblind unkindness of our fellow-men presides over a less gentle tribunal than the spotlessness of His unspeakable sanctity. His very justice is largesse compared with the sympathy of men. His love would be straitened in the widest allowances of their charity. For the present, then, we would rather think of what men see in us when we are dying, than of what God sees. What do we look like to men, when we are dying?

It is hard to lay down general rules in a matter, wherein there is so much diversity. Some men look like their old selves, some as if they had got a new self. Some deaths are touching, because they are so simply what we should have expected beforehand. Others are startling, because they are such amazing revelations. Most frequently men look new in dying. Death dis closes whole regions of unexplored character. Life has not at all drawn us out as it might have done. We all go to our graves unknown, worlds of unsuspected greatness. In truth, life is but a momentary manifestation of us. The longest life is too narrow for our breadth. "We are capable of a thousand positions, and life has only placed us in two or three. Our probation is but a specimen, a sort of matriculation trial for the career of eternity. We divine from it, rather than judge by it. It is thus that the dying so often surprise their friends, and leave them in as much amazement as if they had seen a visible glory round their brows. Some men, like the dolphin, only show their brightest tints in the act of dying. These are close characters, deep hearts, but niggardly in outward demonstrations, men whom few have loved, and who have not been valued rightly even by those who valued them. Some men die grandly, who have lived pusillanimously. Others live hiddenly, and only publish themselves in death. Others have been dark all their lives, begin to grow luminous as they die, and die at the moment when a whole universe of light seems on the point of bursting from them. In truth it does burst, but on the other side, mincylW its lio-ht with the splendours of eternity. St. Philip tells us how astonished he was more than the once with the majesty of a freshly unimprisoned soul.

Sometimes childhood returns in death, both with its evil and its good. Old habits revive, habits that had been overlaid by the contrary habits of long years, or which grace seemed to have extinguished. Now, which habits shall have possession of the man, as he steps into eternity, the more natural habits of earlier life, or the painfully acquired habits of more careful years? It seems as if it were a problem. Surely it cannot be so in reality. There is also a strange acute working up of¹ the guilt of youth, as if faults had never been repented of, or as if absolutions did not penetrate much below the surface. Sorrow does not give us either the free time or the disengaged attention to study the matter, else we might learn wonderful things about the soul from the phenomena of deathbeds. Even the possibili ties of our characters seem at times to unfold themselves before us when we die. Our capabilities of evil assume fearful shapes, fearfully definite, and overwhelm the soul with hideous visions. It is as if our conscious life went deeper down into our souls than it had ever done before, as if death were hunting it from earth over chasms and into caves, and all at once it faces some hitherto unsuspected possibility of uncommitted sin, like coming suddenly on a precipice and looking over, when we have lost our way among the mountains in the night. But so it is, that in one way or another death exposes the barrenness of some natures, and the richness of others, and this last is more particularly the case with women. Perhaps, upon the whole, feminine character is more undeveloped in life than the masculine.

But there is one phenomenon of the deathbed which deserves particular attention, both because, in appearance at least, it is so common, and also because it is so distressing to the witnesses. I allude to that half-conscious stupidity, which is so often drawn like a veil round the faculties of the dying. Who has not seen it? "Who has not chafed in its presence, when it dared to cling like some dishonourable cloud round the noble spirits of those we loved, whose mountainheights deserved to shine calm, erect, and clear in the glory of the setting sun? Yet much of this may be only seeming, like the processes of thought in a drowning man, so vivid, clear, and, if we may so word it, simultaneously consecutive when he is suffocating, and only flinging wild, concentrated, glaring looks to the bank for help. The experience of persons, whom the saints have miraculously cured at the last moment of life, seems to go that way. Death after all is a darkening and a disappearance of those we love, and we must be content to take it so. It is only a question of more or less, where the darkness shall begin, and what it shall eclipse first. To the others who have loved the dying and have gone before him, it is not a darkening but a dawning. Perhaps to them it is the brightest dawn, when it has been the most opaque and colourless sunset on the side of earth. Great operations of grace may be hidden under this apparent stupidity; and on the other hand great interior trials may be experienced during it. It may only pervade the tabernacle of flesh, while, underneath it, the soul may be living a life of precipitate quickness in some new and filial intercourse with God.²

If the stupidity is real, it may be itself a penalty, one of those unconscious penalties which in the things of God are so terrific. As I have said of sudden death, it may be like never dying, and so losing that most gracious chance, a chance gracious for many other reasons besides its being the last. Yet after all it is but ante-dating death, as madness may do a score of years before we die. To all practical intents we have died when the stupidity began, and if, like an evening storm, it clears off before night falls, then is it another chance for us, as if a saint had raised us up by miracle for a little while. Who has not seen how profoundly calm the mind is, which raises itself out of a stupor to perform the act of dying? At the worst it only shows, as all things else that have to do with death, that we must get our dying done before we lie down to die, so far at least as may be. For alas! there will be always much left to do, always much which suddenly seems allimportant, and yet now must actually be left un done.

Such is our look when we are dying. Now how does God look on us? " Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His saints." All things considered, this is not a revelation we should have expected. There is much to surprise us in it, and yet, when we have fed long upon its consolations, we are surprised again to find how it falls in with our idea of God, and how it illuminates His perfections. It is so familiar to us now, that it is not easy for us to realize how strange it has a right to be. Death is the penalty of sin, the chosen punishment, the choice of God Himself. Mercy may mingle with punishment. In God s punishments, even the hopeless one, it mingles largely. But that these punishments should be precious in the sight of God is something more than this, something beyond what we could have expected, something which is full of mystery. Death is touching. There is an inevitable poetry about it, of which no horror or disgrace can wholly strip it. The Creator is touched with the woes of His creatures. There is a pathos in death, as of a setting sun. But it is not merely compassionate sympathy, which the sight of His servants deaths draws forth from God. They are precious in His sight. Ignoble as they are in the world s eye, the creature s dishonour, its most repulsive feebleness, the shame of his physical misery, God does not simply bear with them, or condescend to nurse us through them. They are precious in His sight. They are His jewels, a something in creation which He keeps for Himself, a tithe paid Him, which He lays up in heavenly storehouses. Surely it is because Jesus was to die, and the Cross has made the punishment an honour to such as make their deaths a Calvary. That blessed death is the vast sunset in which we all sink to rest. It lingers on earth s horizon till the day of doom, and we all set in it, encompassed with a mellow glory which is not our own. Death was precious to God of old, because Jesus was to die. It is precious to Him now, because Jesus has already died.

God s attitude towards death, therefore, is something very peculiar. He seems, not exclusively, but very singularly, to concentrate His creative love upon it. This is the case whether His love takes the form of severity or of indulgence; for deathbed severity is often deepest love by being the anticipation of a justice which is a thousand times more tolerable on this side the grave than on the other. He sometimes waits till death to reward past endeavours, to remove dryness, to with draw temptations, or to give a long-contested victory over some besetting fault, such as uncharitableness, un belief, injustice, or a hard heart. Then, on the other hand, He sometimes puts off our interior trials till death, and sanctifies us then with a rapidity which is the extremity of suffering. Sometimes He waits till then to punish carelessness and venial sin. Some men are less likely to fail under a weight in the hour of death, while to other men it is the likely hour for failing. Our Father s love learns from His wisdom how to dispose things in the gentlest way. On the other hand He often fulfils only in death the prophecies of our past lives, especially the prophecies of our early years:

or He lets us learn then for the first time, that a work has long been done in our souls, which we have regretted as undone, and longed to have it done. Some He blindfolds in death, that not a breath may tarnish their humility. Others He floods with light that they may throw themselves the more fearlessly into His eternal arms. None of His servants does He disappoint in death. All find riches there, more than they looked for, both in kind and in degree. What is precious to Himself, He makes unspeakably precious to us. Faith cannot so misread the signs as to be mistaken. The Creator has felt the exile of the creature a burden, if I may dare to sny so, as well as the poor creature itself. Like other fathers, He wants His children home. Thus He has a predilection for the hour of death. Of all the hours of life it is most His. So in it His love is special, and where love is special, justice is special also.

What kind of deaths, then, are those which are more particularly precious in His sight? A saint s death is a work of divine art, accomplished by supernatural skill, and flushed with the glow of eternal beauty. JSTo two are alike, and all are beautiful. We can but select some specimens from the various multitude. The first may be the death of those who have always been dying to themselves. They have adopted this for the form of their spiritual life, as St. Andrew Avellino did. It is a death like the death of Christ, the death of Him who " pleased not Himself." It is the last act of a life which has been death all through, the last death of a thousand deaths. There is a harmony between death and such a life as this, which makes music in the ear of G-od. For the most part, the less a death stands apart from the foregoing life, the less it is a detached and separate mystery, the more has it a look of completeness and perfection about it. This is in truth a very blessed death.

Then there is the death of desire, the kind of death our Blessed Lady died. This belongs to souls to whom God is everything, and to whose simplicity nothing is anything, except God. He has not shared their love He lias sovereignly possessed it. They were sick of all the glorious world, because God was not wholly in it. It had no attractions for them, because God was their one attraction. He fed them with His choicest gifts; but they sickened even then, because His gifts were not Himself. He was jealous, and they were jealous also. They will make bold with Him rather than go without Him. They are all for Him. He also must be as if He were all for them, theirs and only theirs. So the years dragged on with them. They were prompt and brisk, and knew not how they could be so. They were dying all the while they were living. Their life was so completely in Him, that it was almost fictitious as an earthly life. They trailed themselves wearily to life s edge, and then languished for a while, and afterwards, like men bound hand and foot, these helpless captives of divine love fell over into eternity.

Then there is the death of humility. This is a death full of worship. It is a magnificent profession of faith. It praises God. Part of its beauty is in its being so suitable to a creature. It is full of the knowledge of God, and teaches His greatness by the shining light it casts upon it. The soul dies in the attitude of adoration, and is found already prostrate before the Vision which beams upon its sight. We should have thought it was a death, which angels would especially delight to see. It pleads no merits. It rests upon no services.

It covets the least blessings of the Church, as eagerly as if it had nothing else divine about it. It has a special devotion to the sanctity of God, and longs to be clean, and even cleaner, and impossibly clean, before the sight of His unblemished majesty. It counts on nothing but mercy. When it doubts, it does not so much doubt the vastness of God s compassion, as it suspects some special impossibility of its own forgiveness. It is the death of the child, who dies looking into his father s face. How beautiful the smile of infantine contentment, which settles there the moment after!

Then again there is the death of detachment, a death which is hardly a death, because there is nothing to die to, nothing to be loosened from, nothing to leave behind. It is more like a translation than a death. The soul has either never rooted itself in earth, or has unrooted itself long since, so that it has died spiritually before it has died physically. What is left for such a death to be, except an act of love? It is the performing of a sacred ritual, rather than the paying of a penalty. It is rather the peaceful ceremonious fulfilment of a precept than the trembling endurance of a punishment. A hard life makes an easy death. But what life is more hard than one of detachment? A man who is detached is no longer a child of earth; he is an angel entangled in mortal flesh. He is living in heaven already; only he lives there blindfold, and sees not the Vision yet. Men like these, how peacefully they die! They die with natural ease as if they were used to it, and had done so many times before. It almost seems as if there was too little pomp about their end. If we have not some spiritual discernment, a feeling almost of dissatisfaction comes over us, as if they mio-ht be under some delusion, and were not making enoiHi of death. Detachment is the hardest of all spiritual phenomena to understand, while it is one of the simplest to express in words. But the deaths of detached souls are dear to God. Hence it is that the deaths of the poor are often so precious in His sight. Poverty is in itself so pregnant with blessings, that even material poverty surrounds itself with benedictions for which it has not striven. God loves to have His creatures loose and unrooted. There is not a more wondrous earnest of a happy death, than that rare sweetness of an uprooted yet still blossoming old age. In all the gardens of the Church there is no blossom more heavenly than that.

Let us speak of one more death, and then close our list. Let it be the death of saintly indifference. This is a death so obscurely veiled in its own simplicity, that we can hardly discern its beauty. We must take it upon faith. It is the death of those who for long have been reposing in sublimest solitude of soul in the will of God. All complications have disappeared from their inward life. There is a bare unity about it, which to our unseeing eyes is barren as well as bare. All devotions are molten in one. All wishes have dis appeared, so that men look cold, and hard, and sense less. There is no glow about them when they die. They die in colourless light. They make no demon strations when they go. There is no pathos in their end, but a look, it is only a look, of stoical hardness. They generally speak but little, and then it is not edifying; but rather on commonplace subjects, such as the details of the sick room, or news about relatives; and they speak of these things as if they were neither interested in them, nor trying to take an interest. Their death, frcm the very excess of its spirituality, looks almost animal. They lie down to die like beasts, such is the appearance of it; independently, as if they needed none of us to help them; and uncomplainingly, as if fatalism put them above complaining. They often die alone, when none are by, when the nurses are gone away for awhile. They seem almost as if they watched the opportunity to die alone. As they have lived like the eagles of the mountain-tops, so like the eagles they mostly die high up without witnesses, and in the night. This death is too beautiful for us to see its beauty. It rather scares us by something about it which seems inhuman. More of human will would make it more lovelv to us; for what is there to be seen when the will of the saint has been absorbed long since into the will of God? Like the overflow of some desert wells, the waters of life sink into the sand, without a tinkling sound to soothe the ear, without a marge of green to rest_the eye.

These are the deaths which are especially precious in the sight of God. But far lower deaths than these are precious to Him also. Were it not so, there would be little consolation for ourselves. Our attainments must be other than they are, or we must look to dying in lowlier places and in more ordinary ways. It is hard not to have some wishes about our own death. Neither is it at all clear, that such an absence of wishes would be more perfect for such as we are. The wishes of the creature seem often to move the love of God. Mercy not unfrequently appears to have fixed upon no road of her own, but waits for us to lead, and she will do our bidding. Is it certain that even in the saints the supernatural has altogether suspended the natural? In us at least, to be natural is almost a grace, and to be natural with God is quite a grace. The supernatural purifies and ennobles the natural in most good hearts, and does not altogether kill it. But I will take leave to doubt this total extinction of nature even in the saints. So we may blamelessly wish wishes about our own death, and our wishes shall only give more gracefulness and more sincerity to our conformity of will with God.. -

First, then, we should wish, indeed do we not already unconditionally pray for it? to have all the usual sacraments, to be surrounded with every benediction of the Church which belongs to the soothing pageantry of the last hour, the unbroken presence of a priest of the Most High, frequent absolutions, and St. Peter s last act of indulgent jurisdiction. We can spare none of these things, not so much as one drop of holy water. Dying souls are as thirsty as the desert sands, and will drink in all dews of heaven which may be allowed to fall upon them. We would have relics of the saints about us or in the room, so that we might as it were be touching the hem of their garments, as well as multiply the number of angels in our room: for must not angels

O "--J always be sentinels where relics are? We would have our Blessed Lady present, and St. Joseph, according as we understand them to have promised that they would be. We do not ask to see or hear them. We think of what we are, and shrink from such petitions, though to make them might be not unhumble. Only at least let us have the real protection of their presence, with as much or as little of the sensible joy of it as shall seem fitting to the divine condescensions. Our patron saints and angels too we would have to be present there, and we would even make bold to supplicate for the human-hearted Raphael, so safe a comrade on a long and unknown journey, and for the affectionate St. Michael,³ who is the viceroy of purgatory and will one day present us at the court of heaven.

We would wish for the use of reason to the last. Ready to obey, we would even plead with those who might wish, for the lulling of our pain, to give us opiates at the last. Let us go to God with the full possession of our reason. We are ready to submit, if God wills it otherwise. He may take us in our sleep; but we would rather not. Nay, we know that delirium has come sometimes as an answer to holy prayers, that so the graces of a glorious death might be shrouded from the eyes of men. No such prayers belong to us. We would ask for entire consciousness, so that our last breath might end an intelligent act of love. Yet we would not lay too much stress on this. We would rather leave to God all that is physical about our death. We only ask for this, because we think it is a blessing which may haply be something more than physical. This may be imagination. We are but children in the sight of God. He finds a worship even in the foolishness of our desires, and is not impatient.

The grace, which of all others we covet for our last hour, is that of perfect contrition. We would have the fear of sin, which has haunted us through life, grow yet more perfect when we come to die. We must all die in love, if we would die well. But there are many loves, and we should choose to die in contrite love. There has always seemed to us a special attractiveness about contrition. It seems to come out of a special devotion to the Attributes of God. No form of holiness is so winning, as that which is based on an abiding sorrow for sin. We would long therefore for a grand contrition at the hour of death. Perhaps then we shall fear purgatory more keenly than we fear it now.

There are some who do not fear it, but think of it only as a piece of unmerited good fortune." In truth it is so, when we think of the dark possibilities. Yet it is more than this. It cannot be well not to fear it. We shall most likely have better discernment when we come to die; and we shall then fear all punishments of God, because of the burning of our desire to see His Face, which is the unspeakable thirst of dying souls. Has any dying man ever spoken joyously of his approaching passage into purgatory? I have neither read nor heard of any. Such is rather the language of those who are far off from it, with all their undipped abilities to sin upon them. It would sound harsh on a deathbed, and offend our pious instincts. Thus the desire to go at once to God may give a new value to contrition in our eyes when we come to die. Indeed if it be reverent, for to be particular with God goes near to an irreverence, we would ask to have so vehement a sorrow for our sins, that its intensity might be the proximate cause of our death, that we might die a minute or an hour sooner than we should have died had our sorrow for sin been less. But this is perhaps too magnificent a grace for us.

Then also we would desire not to die what is called a triumphant death. Grace may triumph over us. Our end may be a signal triumph of God s mercy. But for ourselves all triumph is unmeet, unless for some special end God so ordained it. Gertrude of Adelhausen, a Dominicaness, laughed out loud all through her agony, and died laughing; so inebriated was she with love of God. St. Mary d Oignies sang loud and clear three days and nights before she died, because the Holy Ghost had given her such a gift of jubilee. St. Elizabeth of Hungary turned her face to the wall, and sang without moving her lips, as if a nightingale were in her throat, and died thus singing in her extasy. But these things are not for us. If ever in life we should be real, and might hope to be so, it would be at the hour of death. Yet there is unreality even there. We can act, and bo affected even then, and our drama and our affectation may not be faultless. Then there are inculpable unre alities to which bodily weakness exposes us, and these are not moral, but we shrink from them very greatly in the prospect. Delusion is everywhere, until we have parted company with the Deceiver, and gone to live in the light of God. Triumphant deathbeds appear to be encompassed with delusions. We had rather even that our death should be mostly silent, lest even in the conscious utterance of edifying words we should get from under the weight of God s fear and out of the sense of His presence. It is hardly unloving to wish what those we leave behind will like least and will find even, painful: it is not unloving when the occasion is so great as that of death, and the interests at stake are the substantial things of our eternity. We may even wish what our last words might be. It is not unchildish so to do. It is the spontaneous utterance of our devotion. Perhaps we should desire, with frequent invocations of holy Names, with frequent commendations of our spirits into our Father s hands, to say at last as expressing all, Sancta Trinitas, unus Deus, miserere mei. Perhaps we have already wished too much.⁴ But we are ready for any other will of God. As to the when, the where, the how, and the with what pain, we are to die, we have no wish about all that. We leave it all to God. He knows what is best. We will have nothing to do with death merely as a physical thing. To us it shall never be anything else but the gateway.of our Father s house.

We are never tired of that old picture from that first of all the gospels, the book of Genesis, the picture of the Creator brooding over His own creation, as if in survey of it and in complacency, and pronouncing it very good. It is always new to us, almost the more new the more it is familiar. So is it sweet to think of the same Creator, bending and brooding over the beautiful deathbeds of those who die in Jesus, as if the beauty of them was precious to Him, as if each of them was another faithful portrait of His dear Son, another translucent depth of Calvary imaging His own perfections. God is the Creator: death is His own invented punishment, the sternest old historic monument on earth: and He the Creator has died Himself: and now look at Him, pathetically outpouring all this love over us His timid dying creatures! Is it not almost a reverent joy for us to think that we have still one action left to do, which will be precious in the sight of God? Is it then only a fear and trembling, and not a joy as well, that we know that the messenger of death, near even if He still be out of sight, is swiftly now with soundless footfall stealing up to us? There is a quiet, sweet anxiety to die, which makes our lives more diligent, and is exceeding happiness.

Footnotes

1. o o o i ↩

2. Miy I venture to say, that, from materialistic habits of mind, some medical writers have made too much of this stupidity? ↩

3. >^j ↩

4. Thus for instance, when St. Gertrude, out of devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, prayed that she might have to swallow nothing, whether food or medicine, after the Viaticum, our Lord said He disapproved the prayer. Revelat. lib. iii. cap. 35. ↩