crape, and the purposed hideousness of the heavy cap in which the widow laments the “deliverance” of her husband “from the burden of the flesh”?  What more revolting than the artificially long faces of the undertaker’s men, the drooping “weepers”, the carefully-arranged white handkerchiefs, and, until lately, the pall-like funeral cloaks?  During the last few years, a great and marked improvement has been made.  The plumes, cloaks, and weepers have well-nigh disappeared.  The grotesquely ghastly hearse is almost a thing of the past, and the coffin goes forth heaped over with flowers instead of shrouded in the heavy black velvet pall.  Men and women, though still wearing black, do not roll themselves up in shapeless garments like sable winding-sheets, as if trying to see how miserable they could make themselves by the imposition of artificial discomforts.  Welcome common-sense has driven custom from its throne, and has refused any longer to add these gratuitous annoyances to natural human grief.

In literature and in art, alike, this gloomy fashion of regarding Death has been characteristic of Christianity.  Death has been painted as a skeleton grasping a scythe, a grinning skull, a threatening figure with terrible face and uplifted dart, a bony scarecrow shaking an hour-glass—­all that could alarm and repel has been gathered round this rightly-named King of Terrors.  Milton, who has done so much with his stately rhythm to mould the popular conceptions of modern Christianity, has used all the sinewy strength of his magnificent diction to surround with horror the figure of Death.

                              The other shape,
    If shape it might be called, that shape had none
    Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb,
    Or substance might be called that shadow seemed,
    For each seemed either; black it stood as night,
    Fierce as ten furies, terrible as hell,
    And shook a dreadful dart; what seemed his head
    The likeness of a kingly crown had on. 
    Satan was now at hand, and from his seat
    The monster moving onward came as fast,
    With horrid strides; hell trembled as he strode....
    ...  So spoke the grisly terror:  and in shape
    So speaking, and so threatening, grew tenfold
    More dreadful and deform....
    ... but he, my inbred enemy,
    Forth issued, brandishing his fatal dart,
    Made to destroy:  I fled, and cried out Death!
    Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed
    From all her caves, and back resounded Death.[1]

That such a view of Death should be taken by the professed followers of a Teacher said to have “brought life and immortality to light” is passing strange.  The claim, that as late in the history of the world as a mere eighteen centuries ago the immortality of the Spirit in man was brought to light, is of course transparently absurd, in the face of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary available on all hands.  The stately Egyptian Ritual with its Book of the Dead, in which are traced the post-mortem journeys of the Soul, should be enough, if it stood alone, to put out of court for ever so preposterous a claim.  Hear the cry of the Soul of the righteous: