And this last thought prepares for the statement of our view of the attitude a rational religion takes up in the solemn presence of death. "Stoicism shall not be more exigent," said Emerson of the new Church. We take no lax view of life and its responsibilities, but we refuse to magnify death into the one thing worth living for or thinking about. _Homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat_. We do not set about digging our graves, we do not carry our coffins about with us, still less do we sleep in them--a gruesome practice which has attracted some fanatical folk. To us, death is a fact, not an effect, an incident as natural as birth, in no wise affecting the real, the spiritual, man. We therefore utterly disavow all sympathy with the groundless assumption that a magical change comes over the psychical powers of a man at that supreme moment, whereby he can do no more good, but may harden into a more hopeless reprobate. The notion that a judgment of the soul takes place, as in the hall of Osiris, of Egyptian mythology, at the instant of dissolution, whereby the destiny of the individual is sealed for ever, we repudiate in terms. Man is judged, not then, but at every moment of his life. "The moral laws vindicate themselves" without the intervention of any external tribunal. And, therefore, the eternal progress of the man in us is maintained uninterruptedly across the gloomy chasm of death, under other circumstances, no doubt, but still it is the same ceaseless approach towards the Infinite Ideal, the same untiring journey along "the everlasting way". All are in that "way," we may be sure, even those whom we foolishly deem hopelessly reprobate. Something can be made of those failures of men, for After last returns the first, though a wide compass round be fetched; What began best can't end worst, nor what God once blest prove accurst. But such men, the Neros, Caligulas, the Wainwrights and Palmers of all ages and nations, are but a fractional, an infinitesimal, element in the great human family. _Sanabiles fecit nationes super terram_. "He hath made earth's peoples to be healed;" they shall redeem _themselves_ one day. The moment of awakening comes sooner or later to all; there is an unextinguished capacity for good under the sores and scars of the most dissolute life, and we may believe that awakening comes when the spirit enters new-born, as it were, into a world where the illusions of the flesh, the deceptions of the sense, obtain no more.