gienically as possible; harbor cleanly, uplifting thoughts, helpful to others and to ourselves, and so reach out spiritually for a fuller understanding of the purposes of all life. And what we cease to fear for ourselves, we soon cease to fear for our other selves.

Living thus, we shall not fear death, but shall move toward it without thinking of it, knowing that it is natural, merely the long sleep of the objective consciousness.

Sleep till the end, true soul and sweet!
Nothing comes to thee new or strange.
Sleep full of rest from head to feet;
Lie still, dry dust, secure of change.
TENNYSON.

O'er each vain eye oblivious pinions wave,
And quench'd existence crouches in a grave.
What better name may Slumber's bed become?
Night's Sepulcher, the universal Home,

Where Weakness, Strength, Vice, Virtue, sunk supine,
Alike in naked helplessness recline;

Glad for a while to heave unconscious breath,

Yet wake to wrestle with the dread of death,

And shun, though day but dawns on ills increased, That Sleep, the loveliest, since it dreams the least.

BYRON.

CHAPTER XXXIV

A NATURAL CHANGE

THROUGH generations, perhaps for hun

dreds of thousands of years, custom has ordained grief for the dead, we have come to feel that it is a proof of affection or of sensitiveness or a sort of virtue: we indulge in the luxury of woe, we nurse our grief until, like a spoiled lap-dog, it becomes a burden. But we know that the unselfish dead would only be distressed at our grieving.

When we look upon the change called death as no more mysterious than any of the other changes in our bodily or mental development, which we either welcome or are unconscious of, we shall lose our terror of it either for ourselves or for others.

Our terror for others is not really for those others so much as for ourselves. The sense of “our great loss" is really a piece of selfishness. For life cannot mean one thing for us and another for our brother; as we see our own lives, so must we see the lives of those we love. The purposes of life are the same for all men, for all men are in the plan of the Spirit.

If for any reason our brother has passed

from our earthly cognizance, we cannot say that we have really lost him. It is true that we do not see him with our eyes or touch him with our hands, but we have a remembrance of him in the form of a mental picture down to the minutest details of how he looked and moved, and we also have a remembrance of his spiritual character.

For the character-that sum of the abilities of those we love-remains with us after the physical form has passed away. We are affected by it just as we were when the loved one lived. We can feel the appeal that that character makes to us, its effect upon our thoughts and actions, as strongly as if the absent one stood beside us and claimed our attention. How, then, can we say he is lost?

The dead whom we have loved hold us as securely as they did when they were living; it is only that we do not see how. It has come within the experience of many that the death of father, mother, or some dearly loved one has led to the awakening of some wayward or misguided one who seemed to be wasting all the opportunities of life. We know that it was not the mere death which worked this seeming miracle. That simply woke the dormant love in the one who had hitherto desired only his own way. As soon as he became conscious of his love for the beloved one who has passed out of his earthly life, he longed to be what his be

loved would have had him be, and so he turned his attention to using the opportunities of life, to the end that he might grow and develop. Thus in death the loved one held the wayward friend even more securely than he ever had in life.

We shall not fear death, even for those we love, when we have realized that it is but a passing from life to life-just as the falling leaves do not mean the annihilation of the life of the tree, but merely the end of one phase of that life. Somewhere, some time, that which was really our loved one will blossom again in the world's experience, and even now is continuing to live through its influence upon our lives. "There is no death; what seems so is transition."

The bodily companionship with all that it implies, that we have lost: yet, if our beloved had gone to be Viceroy of India, we should miss him, but we should not put on mourning for that, nor "grieve" that we had lost his companionship.

"But we could write and hear from him and so keep in touch with him." True: it is then for your own loss that you mourn.

Nearly all the suffering that death causes us is for ourselves. It is our feeling of helplessness, the emptiness of the earth that is left, the changed world that we look at in the sleepless hours of the night, or, when we awake in