The servitors of distorted religions encourage their wards in the purchase of places in the cemetery, where through their advance arrangements they will lie more advantageously and honorably than others more indigent and hence undeserving of lengthy prayers.
But We say that man is eternally being born, and particularly at the moment of so-called death. Certainly life is not a grave, where one trembles before the justice of an Unknown Judge! In keeping with their opinion, scholars have proposed the ingenious consolation: “Man begins to die from the moment of his birth”-a scanty and funereal comfort. Certainly life is not a market, where one can make a fine bargain for entrance into the Heavenly Kingdom.
Only that Teaching which contains all hope, which makes life beautiful, which manifests action, can promote true evolution. They force us to learn that which it is wholesome for us to know, but which habitually we try to ignore - namely, that really we have no claim on a long life that we are each of us liable to be called off at any moment, and that the main point is not how long we live, but with what meaning we fill the short allotted span - for short it is at best. The terrible events of life are great eye-openers. The bitter, yet merciful, lesson which death teaches us is to distinguish the gold from the tinsel, the true values from the worthless chaff. And we may think of them as silent, invisible, but real presences in our households. For they are not wholly separated from us, if we remain loyal to them. And let the memory of our dead help us to do this. Let us live truly while we live, live for what is true and good and lasting. Let us learn from the lips of death the lessons of life. Felix Adler, Life and Destiny (1913), Section 8: Suffering and Consolation. Then can we turn to life and fill the whole horizon of our souls with it, turn with added zest to all the serious tasks which it imposes and to the pure delights which here and there it affords. We should begin early in life to vanquish this enemy by obliterating every trace of the fear of death from our minds. It is written that the last enemy to be vanquished is death. Joseph Addison, The Spectator (1711–1714) No. The Fear of Death often proves Mortal, and sets People on Methods to save their Lives, which infallibly destroy them. Also in Sophocles-Trachiniæ, and Œdipus Tyrannus Abd-el-Kader, as reported in The Cyclopædia of Practical Quotations edited by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt (1882), p. Death is a black camel, which kneels at the gates of all. Men fear death, as children fear to go in the dark and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.
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