Nothing need be said here of short, sharp, fatal illness. Most of us know that short, sharp illnesses, not fatal, have not enlightened us much in regard to death and its appropriate feelings. Either pain or exhaustion usually causes, in such cases, an apathy which leaves nothing to be remembered or revealed. I was once told by a child, after some hours of exhausting pain, what she had overheard below,--that if some contingency, which she specified, did not arise, I should die before night. I fully believed it; and I felt nothing, unless it were some wonder at feeling nothing. Almost every person has a similar anecdote to tell; and there remains only the short and pregnant moral, that all preparations for leaving this life, and entering on the next, should be made while the body is well and the spirit alive. But how does death appear to those who rest half-way between it and life, or are very gradually passing over from the one to the other? Much depends, of course, on how far the vital forces are impaired--on whether the condition be such as to obscure or to purify the spiritual vision. If we want to know the effect of nearness and realisation, and not the pathology of the case, we must suppose the vital powers to remain faithful, however they may be weakened. In such cases, I imagine the views of death remain much what they were before, though they must necessarily become more interesting, and the conception of them more clear. I know of no case of any one who before believed, or took for granted, a future life, who began to disbelieve or doubt it through sickness. I have known cases of those who disbelieved it in health, seeing no reason to change their opinion on the approach of death,--being content to have lived--satisfied to leave life when its usefulness and pleasantness are gone--not desiring a renewal of it, but ready to awake again at the word of their Creator, if indeed a further existence be in reserve for them. Such cases I have known: but none of a material change of views in the prospect of death.