In all the domain of organized being, it is only man, who, in his crude
egotisms, and defiant resistance to nature's laws, makes ado with
death. The dainty denizen of the air, and the things that creep over
the earth, the leviathan in his nature element, and his warmer-blooded
brother whose passage causes the earth to tremble beneath his tread,
all the multitudinous expressions of the animal kingdom, that disport
themselves in fur, or feather, in filament of scales, or covering of
hair, each and all recognize the approach of their final experience on
earth, and hie themselves to their appointed coverts, to keep their
tryst with their old mother in utter privacy. How well she loves her
children! She sheds over them her varied mantle of leaf, and piney
bloom, or scented brake, and soothes them with softly falling rain, or
tender dew, and woos their elements back into her bosom from which they
sprang. All this is in consonance with nature's arrangement for caring
for her own. There is no such thing known among these as a vulgar
display, or a flaunting of the deposed forces in the faces of the
creatures left behind.
In man's treatment of his kind, there is everywhere betokened his
unfaith and fear. His undeveloped spirituality leaves him without even
so much power to adjust himself to the divine order of progress, by way
of the gates of death--rebirth--as have his humble progenitors, his
representatives in the animal kingdom; and so he plants himself upon
his fancied prerogatives, and turns his dulled senses away from the
God-call: "Come up higher," and moans and raves, and howls his despair
in sounds and terms indicative of his tribal, or racial environment and
relationship.
A voice of love has sounded down throughout the ages in unmistakable
terms to the children of men. "My father has many mansions, invisible
to your seared, earthly vision, but beautifully furnished forth for all
your needs; nor hath eye seen or ear of yours heard the wonderfulness
of the great preparation He hath made to receive you into his kingdom."
And seer and sage have reiterated this in unmistakable language, and
the enlightened of the older races have caught the straying tones of
the vibrant air of the beyond, and have beheld the mirage of the homes
of the blest, and have sought to impress the truth of the living
reality of the beyond upon the inchoate brains of their fellows. But
superstition rears its grizzled front alike in seats of learning, in
the homes of the cultured, and in the hovels of the outcasts; in this
sense, all the human family are of hellish kin, and in a large
percentage of them their whole lives are given over to their effort of
resistance to the divine ordering which speaks ever to the soul of man
in unmistakable terms of tender consideration, saying: "Thy poor days
here are full of pain and sorrow, because of necessary crudities. So
live that when thy summons comes to join the everlasting cavalcade
which sweeps across the world, thou shalt apprehend thy high emprise,
and go forth exultingly to claim thine own meed of further existence in
spheres yet undiscovered to thy longing ken."
"Earth loses thy pattern forever and aye" that thou mayst be renewed
and set up in the finer mould of thy most excellent Karma, which is thy
hidden reality of character. Rejoice then, O mortal! in the
beneficence of nature and of thy Parents, God, for surely it is well
that they call a halt for thee and thine beside the river of death, and
loosen thy burthens of pain and heart-breaking sorrow, and let loose
from thy soul that raven, "Never more," which has preyed long upon thy
soul and held thee in the grip of unspoken despair and anguish. This
is of all demons the blackest and most subtle. In tones of love it has
been proclaimed by the divine mind that nought is ever taken away that
shall not be restored to thee. Not as thou, in thy small, limited way,
wouldst hold it back from its own high place, and mission in the
universe and bend it to thy purpose; but according to the wisdom of its
Creator and thine, shalt thou see and know and claim all that belongs
to thee, be it the inspiration of thy nature, unexpressed here amid the
din and rush of this chaotic existence; or power to carry forth thy
grandly bold designs in conjunction with nature's illimitable
chemistry; or to perfect within thy mind a knowledge of her laws; or to
fold to thy bereaved heart thy lover, friend, or child, so lost to thee
now in the great unexplored silences, that thou wilt not even try to
see their way of life, but art ever persistent in saying they are dead.
Whatever thy soul shalt cherish as highest and best good to be longed
for, that shall be given to thee, in its new and resurrected form, over
which has passed the chrism of the immortal and everlasting life. We
need a new perception of that great law of the "survival of the
fittest." Who are the "fit"? The nomadic tramp who yields no meed of
use to his fellows? The willfully sin-sodden who poisons all his
surrounding atmosphere with the noxious exhalations from his decaying
organism? He who hoards and locks away from his fellows his treasures
of gold or precious knowledge, and he, who having in his hands the
powers of wealth and influence, never deigns to stretch forth his hand
to relieve the cruel stress of the needy or to protect the helpless, or
to sustain and strengthen the weaker ones of earth?
Nay! The true "survival" is not here on this underdone sphere, but
outside, beyond, above, in the realms of the spiritual where our
burdens are loosed and the souls of men are set free, and true liberty
is accorded to each and everyone to be, and to do, all that in him lies
toward the upbuilding of the great sum of the soul life we call God.
Once this perception of the soul and even some slight degree of
knowledge concerning the laws which hold over the destiny of each
individual being becomes, through a familiarity with phenomena now
everywhere common, understood and accepted, the entire life on this
planet will be changed, elevated and happified. Fancy living day after
day under the bondage of the fear and dread of what everyone knows to
be as inevitable as is the experience of each, of physical dissolution;
and yet multitudes of people do so live. It is debasing, and
disennobling in every way. It robs the soul of all its natural dignity
and sends it through the world orphaned, and mourning, where it might
and should recognize its divine relationship, and rejoice in its
unfolding powers; and so you who may be giving a moment to the reading
of this brief testimony to the great truth of immortality, consider,
and realize thy divine paternity and demand what is, and has always
been thine own by right of interblending of thy own inner nature with
that of thy soul's origin, the heart of Him who hath made us.
The bond is eternal and indestructible. God in all humanity and we in
Him, and the sooner we see this and yield ourselves in obedience, not
like "dumb driven cattle" but as self-respecting, self-asserting
mortals--within the law of accord with the highest--the sooner shall we
enter into that "Nirvana" which is "peace."