But in any case the testimony of biology can give us little help. Even if death has had a function in the process of evolution, as seems likely, that in no way eases the situation when the staggering blow falls into our precious circle and removes from it an intimate personal life that was indispensable to us. It is poor, cold comfort to be told that death has assisted through the long æons in the slow process of heightening the entire scale of life, if there is nothing more to say regarding the future of this dear one whose frail bark has now gone to wreck. We must somehow rise above the level of brute facts and discover some spiritual significance which death has revealed, before we can arrive at any source of comfort. We are all agreed with Shakespeare’s Claudio that “’tis too horrible” to think of death as a sheer terminus: “ ... to die and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling regions of rock-ribbed ice; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world.” Death has undoubtedly brought to consciousness, as has perhaps no other experience, the deeper meaning and significance of personal life. This and not its biological function is what concerns us now. It has been said that “freedom,” so far as it is achieved, “is the main achievement of man in the past.”[3] I should be inclined rather to hold that man’s main achievement on the planet so far has been to discover that personal life reveals within itself an absolute value and possesses unmistakable capacity to transcend the finite and temporal, an experience which makes freedom possible. I believe death has ministered more than any other single fact that confronts us in bringing those truths to clear consciousness. We cannot, of course, dissociate death and separate it from pain, suffering, struggle and danger, which are essentially bound up with it. If the world were to be freed completely from death it would at once _ipso facto_ be freed from the danger of it and by the same altered condition struggle would to a large degree be eliminated, and likewise those other great tests of life—pain and suffering, which culminate in death. These things are all “perilous incidents” of finiteness, but of a finiteness which transcends itself and is allied to something beyond itself. To eliminate these things would be to miss the discovery of this strange finite-infinite nature of ours which makes life such a venture and so full of mystery and wonder. If we had been only naturalistic beings, curious bits of the earth’s crust merely capable of recording the empirical facts as they occurred, death would have taken an unimportant place as one more event in a successive series of phenomena. Built as we