The fear of death--shared in by all created beings--is nature's
safeguard against a universal stampede from this life by physical
death, when the miseries of existence on this earthly plane become too
dreadful to be borne, when the tortures of the soul, in the tortured
body drives out all reason, and all philosophy, and the consciousness
senses only the demand for surcease of agony. Probably most people
have experienced, for a moment, in a time of terrible crisis, a
thought, if not an impulse, to seek thus to end all suffering by
flinging off the bonds of life here, and thus pass out into--what?
Simply life in a changed environment, with exactly the same
responsibilities and soul needs, and the same causes of their miseries,
and unsatisfied desires still existing in their minds.
Life here is just one link in the endless, unbreakable chain of
existence. It is all one, here, hereafter, anywhere. Caught in the
web of life, there is no escape from its demands upon the individual
soul. Somewhere along the way it has to decide its own fate, upward
and onward, or downward into the purlieus of the crude beginnings of
things. It is free to make its choice. It can pursue the hard and
toilsome path of earning its right to eternal happiness, or it can flop
around through all the hells of life unrelated to God, and resistant to
Christ.
One by one all human beings must obey the call to march over into the
border land, into nature's infinite invisible realm; they cannot help
themselves; no one can; on they go, an endless caravan, to the land of
revelations, the place of reviews where the utterly selfish are fetched
up with a "round turn" and made to realize that a real Godliness is the
only thing that can pass muster, that mere beliefs do not count, and
only character tells. How swiftly, how inevitably their places are
filled! Nothing stops; prince or peasant, it is all one; the will of
the gods, the guardians of this planet, is being fulfilled.