Winifred Kirkland in _The New Death_ well says: “The New Death, _i.e._, the new view of death, is the perception of our mortal end as the mere portal of an eternal progression and the immediate result is the consecration of all living.... It is a new illumination, a New Death, when dying can be the greatest inspiration of our everyday energy, the strongest impulse toward daily joy.” II THE NEW BORN OUT OF THE OLD Walking across the fields in the spring I found the empty shell of a bird’s egg. The tiny bird that once was in it was lying still and happy under its mother’s wings, or was chirping its new-born song from the limb of a nearby tree, or was trying its new-found wings on the buoyant air. The empty shell was utterly worthless, a mere plaything for the wind. The miracle of life that had stirred within it and had used it for its shelter had gone on and left it deserted. There is a fine proverb which says, “God empties the nest by hatching out the eggs,” and the world is full of this gentle, silent, divine method of abolishing the old by setting free to higher ends all that was true and living in it. “To-day I saw the dragon-fly Come from the wells where he did lie. An inner impulse rent the veil Of his old husk: from head to tail Came out clear plates of sapphire mail. He dried his wings: like gauze they grew; Through crofts and pastures wet with dew A living flash of light he flew.” In the water below, the “old husk” lay empty and useless, while the bright-colored living thing found its freedom in the invisible air. I never go to a funeral without thinking of this miracle of transformation which brings the bird out of the egg, the flower out of the seed, the dragon-fly out of its water-larva. In his own mysterious way God has emptied the nest by the hatching method, and all that was excellent, lovable, and permanent in the one we loved has found itself in the realm for which it was fitted. The body is only the empty shell, the shattered seed, the old husk, which the silent forces of nature will slowly turn back again into its original elements, to use over again for its myriad processes of building: “And from his ashes may be made The violet of his native land.” Those who treasure up the outworn dust and ashes, who make their thoughts center about the empty shell, are failing to read aright the deeper fact, which life everywhere is trying to utter, that that which belongs in the higher sphere cannot be pent up in the lower.