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.”