“What a frightful country to live in,” she exclaimed, “if everyone who has attained to years of discretion is doomed to look like that! I would rather pass my probation with the spirits than endure such a hideous mockery of life. To watch the gradual decay of all physical beauty must be an almost unendurable torment.”
“There you are mistaken,” I responded, somewhat warmly. “Our old people, provided they have, by an honourable and useful life, gained the respect of their fellows, are honoured more in old age than in comparative youth. It is true that the eyesight becomes impaired; the sense of hearing fails; the teeth fall out; the appetite becomes dulled; strength vanishes; and the gait becomes feeble and halting. But it is also true that in most cases the mental faculties are simultaneously affected, and that the consciousness of physical deterioration, therefore, fails to affect our old people as powerfully as you might think.”
“Worse and worse!” cried the Principal, with emphatic conviction. “It seems to me that with you to live is simply to be fully conscious of dying. No New Amazonian would support such a miserable existence for a day. I, for one, would at once resolve to disembody myself, and seek final glorification in a less trammelled state.”
“Disembody yourself? Do you mean that you would commit suicide?”
“I mean that my body should cease to live.”
“But it is a crime to take the life God gave us.”
“I see that superstition ranks rife with you. We should consider it a much greater crime to permit a grovelling, decaying body to chain the spirit to earth and nothingness, than to sever the life which prevents it from seeking perfection in more congenial regions.”
“I certainly do feel lamentably dense and ignorant while listening to you. I cannot, for instance, fathom your meaning when you say the spirit can seek perfection after death.”
“The spirit never dies. The body is but the casing in which the spirit is given its greatest opportunities of seeking final glorification. As we acquire knowledge of every kind, and learn more and more to fathom the secrets which nature has so long guarded with such jealousy, so much nearer shall we be towards the ultimate perfection of the spirit which assimilates most nearly to Life-giver herself, and constitutes our ideal of final bliss. After the death of our material form, we still strive to reach our desired goal, but our progress, when disembodied, is not so rapid as while still inhabiting our earthly casing, and our ultimate arrival at the zenith of wisdom, purity, and bliss; in other words, Heaven, may be delayed for ages by a premature exit from this world.