Silent and invisible as they are, they hold us with a tremendous power. What our friends, our neighbors, our relatives think us capable of doing, that we can do with comparative ease; but anything out of the common, calling for the exercise of ability which they do not suppose us to possess--how nearly impossible it is for us to do it, however conscious we may be of the inherent power! As a part of the race we are bound to it by magnetic currents so long as our mortal life continues, and the cutting off of these currents by death may be to our consciousness the greatest misfortune or the greatest happiness we have ever known. Now I am not preaching, I am simply stating that which I know to be true. I know it in the same way that I know anything wherein experience shuts out even the shadow of a doubt. To speak of the misfortune of death: suppose you were a clock which for twenty-five years had been a part of the world's life, keeping good time and always on duty. Then suppose you were suddenly laid away in the dark and dusty attic of a warehouse until some estate should be settled that would require an indefinite number of years. The comparison is not perfect. The clock is not only mostly automatic, as we are, but entirely so. That in our nature which is essentially free is not even touched by death, but the bodily activities and associations may be our only field of action, and these are cut off absolutely, while memory recalls every event of the life that is finished, and especially every decision which has had the slightest influence upon our destiny. The positive element in us which has found constant vent in physical action is rendered helpless by the complete paralysis of all the motor nerves. We cannot even think, for this requires some movement of the brain. A consciousness of being left behind while the world travels on, a feeling that this experience had not been foreseen in the least, nor in any way provided against, spite of warnings which now seem to echo and re-echo through the darkness--these are what is left us in place of the sunlight, the breezes of evening, the voices of children, the light of the stars. But death may be release, it may be happiness, it may be ecstasy beyond the power of words to tell. We may have cast the long look ahead in time. We may have decided that since bodily life is limited at best, it shall not be first in our regards: its appetites, its demands, shall not take precedence above those calls which find their answer in the depths of being, calls to rise out of the mire of reckless self-indulgence, and clothe ourselves in the garb of a true manhood and womanhood, taking for our model those who count not their life dear unto them, but reach out for eternal values.