2. In order to induce yourself to do good give frequent thought to the fact that you must soon die. Picture to yourself vividly that you are on the eve of death, and you surely will not dissemble, deceive, lie, condemn, censure, feel malice or take the property of others. On the eve of death you perform only the simplest of good deeds: Help, comfort, and show love to others. And such acts are just those that are needed most and give most joy. For this reason it is well always to be mindful of death, particularly if entangled in the affairs of life.
3. When people realize that death has come, they pray and repent of their sins in order to come before God with a pure soul. But do we not daily die a little and are we not every moment on the brink of death ? Therefore we ought not to wait for the hour of death, but be ready all the time.
And to be ready for death means to live right.
This is just the reason that death always hangs over men so that they may be at all times prepared to die, and preparing for 4^th may live right.
4. There is nothing more certain than death, nothing more positive than that it will come for us all. Death is more certain than the morrow, than night following day, than winter following summer. Why is it then that we prepare for the night and for the winter time, but do not prepare for death. We must prepare for death. But there is only one way to prepare for death—^and that is to live well. The better the life which we live, the less is the fear of death, and the easier is death itself. For the man of holiness there is no death.
5. How soon must we die! And still we can not rid ourselves of dissimulation and passions, still we cling to the old prejudice that the external things of the world have the power to harm us, still we fail to be gentle with all men.
Marcus Aurelius.
6. If you are in doubt and do not know how to act, picture to yourself that you will have to die before evening, and your doubts are dissolved: you see at once with perfect clearness what is the call of duty and what is mere personal desire.
7. In the sight of death all life becomes solemn, significant and truly fruitful and joyous. In the sight of death we can not shirk the task assigned to us in this life, because in the sight of death it is impossible to attend zealously to anything else. And when thus engaged, we find life a joy, and are freed from that fear of death which vitiates the life of those people who are not living in the sight of death.
8. Live as though you are about to ^vj l^x^s:^^^ 4s^
life, and as though whatever time remains to you is an unexpected gift. Marcus Aurelius.
9. Live for an age and for a day. Labor as though you had an eternity to live, and act towards others as though you were on the brink of death.
10. The consciousness of approaching death teaches men to know how to bring their affairs to completion. And of all human affairs there is one only which is always fully perfected: it is present love.
11. Living oblivious of death and living in the full consciousness of approaching it closer every hour are two entirely distinct modes of existence. The former is akin to the animal, the latter to the divine.
12. In order to live without anguish we must have the hope of joys ahead of us. But what joys can be hoped for if ahead of us is only old age and death? What then should we do? Set the object of our life not in the blessings of the body, but in spiritual blessings, not in acquiring more learning, wealth, glory, but in acquiring more and more goodness, more and more love, more and more freedom from the body—and then old age and death will cease to be bogies and agony, but will become the very thing you long for.
VL
Dying
1. We understand under death both the dissolution of life and the minutes or hours of the process of dying. The first, the dissolution of life, does not depend upon us, but the second, the process of dying, is in our power. Our dying may be good, or it may be bad. We must strive to die right. This is needful for those who survive.
2. In the dying moments of man the candle by the
light of which he turned the leaves in his book of anxieties, illusions, sorrows and ills, flares up more brightly than ever, illuminating all that had previously been obscure, then it flickers awhile, grows dimmer and goes out forever.
3. The dying man understands the living with difficulty, but you feel that this difficulty of understanding that which is living is not due to the weakening of his mental forces, but to his beginning to comprehend something else, something that the living do not, can not understand, and this absorbs all his powers.
4. It is generally thought that the life of the very aged is of no consequence, that they are merely winding up their days. This is untrue: the most precious activities of life, most needful to themselves and to others, are carried on in the closing years of the very aged. The value of life is in inverse ratio to the square of distance from death. It would be well if all understood this, both the aged and those around them. But most precious of all is the last dying moment.
5. Before reaching old age I endeavored to live right. Having reached old age I endeaver to die right. In order to die right, one must die willingly. Seneca.
6. Do I fear death ? I think I do not, but with its approach, or when meditating upon it, I cannot but experience a feeling of agitation akin to that experienced by the traveler who nears the spot where his train is to drop from some lofty height into the depths of the sea, or be taken up in a balloon to some dizzy height. The dying man knows that nothing unusual is happening to him, but only that which has happened to millions of others, that he is merely about to change his mode of travel, but he can not avoid a flutter of excitement when nearing the place where the change is to be made.
7. All things in li(« seem very simple; all things are connected with one another, are of one order and explain one another. But death appears something exceptional, some break in the chain of that which is simple, clear and intelligible in life. Therefore men for the most part try to give no thought to death. This is a grave error. On the contrary, life must be so harmonized with death as to give to life something of the solemnity and mystery of death, and to death something of the clearness, simplicity and obviousness of Ufe.
AFTER DEATH
AFTER DEATH
We are asked: "What will be after death?" There 18 only one answer to this question: The body will decay and turn into dust, this we know for a certainty. But what will become of that which we call our soul? To this we can give no answer, because the question "what will become" relates to time. But the soul is not of time. A soul was not nor will be. It only is. Without it, nothing would be.
I.
The Death of the Flesh is Not the Termination of Life,
But Only a Transformation
1. When we die, only one of two things can happen to us: either that which we regard as our self will pass into another being or we shall cease to be separate beings and shall merge with God. Whichever happens, we have nothing to fear.
2. Death is a change of our body, the greatest, the final change. We have passed through bodily changes continuously, and we are forever passing through them: once we were naked fragments of flesh, then babes at the mother's breast, then we grew hair and teeth, then we lost some teeth and acquired others, then our beard grew, still later we turned bald and grey, but we have never feared any of these changes.
Why then do we fear this last final change?
Because no one has told us convincingly what will happen to us after this change. But if a man leaves us to go on a journey and fails to write to us, who can tell how he fares when he finally arrives at his destination? We can merely say that we have no news of him. It vs. чксс>гк