"It is quite easy," I imagine the preacher saying, "to talk in this strain now, but wait until you are on your death-bed." But the frightful death-bed scenes we read of in religious literature are generally fictitious. When they are not impostures, a careful investigation will show that they are the effect of pulpit sensationalism. The dying thoughts of a sane and brave man or woman are as free from torture as the sleep which closes the tired eye-lids. What does a mother think of in her last moments? She thinks of her dear ones--her chil dren! whom she has to leave motherless in the world. How noble is human nature! And it is this nobility which makes theology jealous. The dying mother should be thinking of her God,--her soul, her creed--she should be trembling with fear, and be filled with consternation, instead of thinking lovingly and tearfully of her little ones! And when theology can not get horrible death bed scenes, she invents them. In _Theron Ware_, the deacons of the Methodist church say to their minister, "Give us more of the death-bed scenes of Voltaire and Thomas Paine." For a long time it was a part of the vocation of the theologians to postpone the attack upon an intellectual giant until he was dead or dying. It is not true that when people come to die they confess that the preacher's hell and his heaven are real after all. The other day a negro shot his wife and babe fatally and ran away. When the neighbors arrived upon the scene of the tragedy, they found the dying mother with her arms around her infant trying to soothe its pains. She had torn a fragment of her bodice to stop with it the bleeding wound in the child's arm. Motherhood! Was she worrying about her own soul, about eternity, about God, about the devil, about heaven, about hell! Oh, no! She had one thought which puts all preaching to shame--to ease the pain of her dying child. She forgot she was dying herself. She forgot all about her future reward--but she did not forget her child. That is the way mothers die. No Christian can die a better death. When preachers can speak to us of a God who can love like this negro mother,--or who in the words of the English poet, Wordsworth, will= ```"Never blend his pleasure or his pride ```With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels,"= then, we shall worship him,--not for his heaven, nor from fear of his hell, but for his own blessed self. Others may be able to tell whether or not there is another life. I can not. But whether or not there is a life beyond the grave, I know that spring will come every year, that the gentle rains will fall, the sunlight will woo and kiss all it meets, the harvests will wave, and the world will sleep and wake each day. In the same way I know that whatever the preachers may say about a godless morality, the charities, the devotions, the humanities, the friendships, and the loves, will spring up eternal in our daily lives, and beauty and glory shall never perish from human nature.