In my youth I often heard the old people speak of death as “paying the debt of Nature”--“He has paid the debt.” Life puts us in debt to Nature--the earth, the air, the water--for the elements of our bodies and the powers of our minds, and the time inevitably comes when we must settle the account. That we are going to have something left over--that we have only to pay the debt of the body, and not of the mind--is one of the dreams that it is hard for most persons to give up. Will not then the universal mind that pervades Nature claim its own also? Can you and I hope to remain detached from it forever? Is that a consummation devoutly to be wished? Be assured that no particle of soul or body can be lost. But processes may cease; the flame of the lamp may go out, and the sum total of force and matter remain the same. When a blade of grass dies, a process has ended, and as mysterious a process as went on in Cæsar’s brain and body. And when all life on the earth and in our universe ceases, if it ever does, the problem would remain just as puzzling, if we can fancy ourselves still here to puzzle over it. We are links in an endless cycle of change in which we cannot separate the material from what we call the spiritual. The water in our bodies to-day may have flashed as a dewdrop yesterday, or lent itself to the splendor of the sunrise or sunset, or played a part in the bow in the clouds. To-morrow it may be whirling in the vortex of a tornado, or helping to quench the life of a drowning man, or glistening in the frost figures on the window-pane. The movements of the brain molecules in which the phenomena of thought and consciousness are so mysteriously involved, they, too, are links in the cycle of change. One of our younger poets, John Russell McCarthy, has had the courage to say: “that we must look for life Hereafter, not by one and one,--your soul Alone among the souls of other men, Drifting and staying, a thing apart forever-- But we must see when all at last is counted And the great sum is made, how one by one We have returned to Her, the Mother of All,-- The bit of soul-stuff that She loaned us. For we must live at last a part of Her-- For we shall be forever as one with Her.”