All the household, except the very young servants, knelt round him praying silently, since we did not dare obtrude our own tenets about the deathbed of another faith. The Master stood with his hand on his dying servant’s head; and so the end came very peacefully.
A belated curate appeared at the cottage as the daughter of the house went down to tell Mrs. Adam that all was over; but he fled before the sad burthen was carried in.
We had often noticed it before, but never so forcibly, this shying away of some excellent religious people from any contemplation of the immediate experience of the soul after death. Beyond sentences of comfort as stereotyped as they are vague, which place the departed “safe in the arms of Jesus,” one would almost believe that the average man had no very vivid sense of the future life at all. How otherwise explain the remarks, so frequently heard, that a sudden death is such a desirable end; that it was “such a comfort so-and-so didn’t know he was going”; how explain the attitude at the sick-bed, where the sufferer to the last is deluded with false hopes that he may be spared--what? the knowledge that he is summoned to the house of God, the last opportunity of preparation.
Even when Mrs. Adam’s clergyman came to see her, chief among his consolations was the remark, made in all sincerity: “That’s the kind of death I should prefer to die.”
Good Adam was ready to go, we know that; but can any man with a true sense of his own soul bring himself to wish to be taken in like manner? It is, after all, to wish for one’s self the death one would want for one’s dog. Without even belonging to a Church where the last stage is hallowed and made a culminating act of precious resignation and the highest virtue, it seems to us that the instinctive nobility of man should rebel against the craven doctrine that death is a thing to be huddled through, a step to be taken drugged and blindfolded, that the consciousness is to be chloroformed against the anguish of dissolution. It is to rob humanity of its supremest quality--the triumph of the spirit over the flesh, the noble acceptance of our lot, the dignity of the last renunciation.
Browning, the most virile of our poets, cries: