Why should we be so avid of honourable and affectionate remembrance after
death? Why should we hold this the one thing worth living or dying for?
Why should all that we can know or feel seem but a very little thing as
compared with that which we never either feel or know? What a reversal
of all the canons of action which commonly guide mankind is there not
here? But however this may be, if we have faith in the life after death
we can have little in that which is before it, and if we have faith in
this life we can have small faith in any other.
Nevertheless there is a deeply rooted conviction, even in many of those
in whom its existence is least apparent, that honourable and affectionate
remembrance after death with a full and certain hope that it will be ours
is the highest prize to which the highest calling can aspire. Few pass
through this world without feeling the vanity of all human ambitions;
their faith may fail them here, but it will not fail them—not for a
moment, never—if they possess it as regards posthumous respect and
affection. The world may prove hollow but a well-earned good fame in
death will never do so. And all men feel this whether they admit it to
themselves or no.
Faith in this is easy enough. We are born with it. What is less easy is
to possess one’s soul in peace and not be shaken in faith and broken in
spirit on seeing the way in which men crowd themselves, or are crowded,
into honourable remembrance when, if the truth concerning them were
known, no pit of oblivion should be deep enough for them. See, again,
how many who have richly earned esteem never get it either before or
after death. It is here that faith comes in. To see that the infinite
corruptions of this life penetrate into and infect that which is to come,
and yet to hold that even infamy after death, with obscure and penurious
life before it, is a prize which will bring a man more peace at the last
than all the good things of this life put together and joined with an
immortality as lasting as Virgil’s, provided the infamy and failure of
the one be unmerited, as also the success and immortality of the other.
Here is the test of faith—will you do your duty with all your might at
any cost of goods or reputation either in this world or beyond the grave?
If you will—well, the chances are 100 to 1 that you will become a
faddist, a vegetarian and a teetotaller.
And suppose you escape this pit-fall too. Why should you try to be so
much better than your neighbours? Who are you to think you may be worthy
of so much good fortune? If you do, you may be sure that you do not
deserve it.
And so on _ad infinitum_. Let us eat and drink neither forgetting nor
remembering death unduly. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy
and the less we think about it the better.