noticed in the following striking remarks:-"Perhaps it may seem to some of you as a startling paradox, but it is nevertheless a fact, that the shortness of human life is one of the most powerful elements of human progress. It would seem as if, as the human mind grows and develops, the philosophy and opinions which govern the conduct of life continue to be modified and moulded, until about the age of twenty-five or thirty, when the character becomes unchangeable, opinions become prejudices, and the whole mind, as it were, petrified. Further progress would be impossible, but that another generation, with minds still plastic, comes forward, takes up and carries on the work a few steps, and becomes petrified in its turn. There are certainly some noble exceptions to this rule-instances of minds which with their maturity retain the plasticity of youth-but the very rarity of the exception only proves the rule."*

b3. In its manner.

a1. Its unexpectedness.

§ 166. What would be the effect of an announcement of the period in which death is to occur, we may determine from a consideration of those cases in which such announcement was really supposed to be made. "The apprehension," says Mr. Dendy, in his "Philosophy of Mystery," "of a misfortune or fatality, may prove its cause." Of this we have an illustration given in the case of Glaphyra, mentioned by Josephus, who believing herself warned by the spectre of a deceased husband of approaching death, gradually, as if in obedience to the command, prepared herself

* Report Smithsonian Institute, 1857, p. 124.

to die. Lord Lyttleton's death, now attributed to suicide after a similar supposed supernatural warning, brings us to the same conclusion. Take also the following case, which occurred some years ago in the neighborhood of Philadelphia. The cholera was at that time raging in the city, and a farmer in excellent health, by way of a practical joke, was accosted by a series of medical students, each with the information that he was showing symptoms of the epidemic. "You certainly ought to be careful." "You have the marks of the incipient disease.” "Pardon me for interrupting you, but you ought at once to go home, and take immediate advice." The man went home, and was seized with the Asiatic cholera in its most unequivocal shape. To the same effect is the result of an experiment said to have been tried by Frederick William III. of Prussia. Six persons condemned to death were by royal permission selected as the objects of a medical experiment as to the contagiousness of cholera. Three of them were placed in beds of persons who had died of the disease, but without notice of the fact; three others were informed that they would be so exposed, but were placed in beds with no such supposed infection. Those who had warning were all attacked with the disease, and one of them, at least, fatally; the others escaped. Of a similar character are the cases, which are not rare, of persons who, in undergoing a mock execution, have really died of fright. And the only instances that Scripture gives us of a prophetic intimation of the time of death, are those of Saul and Sapphira; and in these, the effect was instantaneous. Saul, when he heard he was to be slain in the approaching battle, was "sore afraid," and fell paralyzed to

the ground. And though the fate of Sapphira was the result of a direct divine command, yet the accompaniment of the mere annunciation of this command was immediate death.

§ 167. Even were a destruction of the vital powers not to follow, there would be in almost every case a suspension of the nervous energies. Could Mr. Huskisson have seen the time and the circumstances of his own premature death on the railway, it is not likely that his powers, down to the last moment, would have been devoted to perfecting those beneficial schemes of economy, to one of which he fell a victim. The internal improvements of New York would scarcely have received from De Witt Clinton the powerful impulse that inaugurated them, had that capable and indefatigable statesman known that he was to be taken from the work almost in early manhood,—that the energies spent on it would, by his premature death, be unrequited, either to his family or himself, and that he was to be laying the cornerstone of those whom he regarded as his political adversaries. So it is in social life. The fool in the Scriptures would never have built his house and barn, if he had known that this was to be the signal of the awful message that that night his soul was to be demanded of him.

Perhaps we might rise from this to a still higher induction, and take the ground that ignorance of the future is essential to the healthy action of the individual man. In this the epicureanism of Horace unites with the asceticism of Milton. The one, in obedience merely to his gay yet shrewd love of ease, writes,

Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi
Finem Dii dederint.

And Milton, with his grander sweep, tells us,—

Let no man seek

Henceforth, to be foretold what shall befall

Him or his children; evil, he may be sure,
Which neither his foreknowing can prevent;
And he the future evil shall, as less

In apprehension than as substance, feel
Grievous to bear.

On home this knowledge of the future would fall with a double oppressiveness. No man can deny this who, to take the suggestion of a recent impressive writer,* looks back upon his greatest personal sorrow, and inquires what would have been the effect had he all along known of its approach. The young child, who gives so much of the purest peace to its parents,-what would their feelings be if they were to see before them, from its very birth, the little waxen form stretched in its early coffin? The wife, whose comfort and pride it is to throw the delights of home around her husband,—how would her heart sink within her and her hand fail, if in the centre of that home in the decorating and refining of which for another's sake she had bestowed so much care, she were to see that other stretched on the bier, with his hands folded over his breast, and his face bound in the bandages of death? Would the mansion, whose erection has employed so much labor or has evolved and perpetuated so much architectural taste,-would it have reared its marble front, had its owner known that the first pageantry it was to witness was to be that of his own death?

* Rev. John Caird, Sermon on Solitariness of Christ's Sufferings.

Who would keep up the light of hope in the heart or the preparations of welcome in the home, if months or years in advance the wreck of the ship were seen in all its sublime horror? As it is, life lifts an unpenetrable screen before the grave, hiding the path of approach. It is thus we have freedom to hope, energy to undertake, calmness to execute.* b'. Its shape.

§ 168. Sudden death is in itself often a mercy. He who, when advised of his approaching death, turned to the wall and wept bitterly, saying, "I shall see man no more in the land of the living," recalls to us the instinctive feelings of our race when the probability of death is brought home to us at a period when the sensibilities are in health and vigor. Those who have witnessed the breaking, as it is called, of such news to persons under these circumstances, will recollect the terrible shock and the sharp recoil that follows. But in that Providence which regulates death as well as life these cases are but rare. Where sudden death does not come, the approach of the mortal hour is, in many cases, preceded by a deadening of the sensibilities; in others by a sort of mist, which, like the vapor of Indian Summer, throws a graceful halo over the scene. And, so far as the mere article of death is concerned, it may be questioned whether the pain connected with it is, under any circumstances, peculiarly great.

§ 169. Those who speak of it after a resuscitation generally concur on this point. The experience of Dr. Adam

See on this point, Fleming's Plea for the Ways of God,” p. 91.