But to get inspiration from the past does not mean to identify oneself with it. “The life which tries to expand itself,” says Monseigneur Spalding, “eliminates dead things from it, and if you are a vivifying force, do not adopt the profession of grave-digger.” Nothing begins over again and everything evolves. Everything evolves slowly and under the impulse of what has gone before. Every age has its own new needs, which must be understood. Ours makes great demands. More complex and more troublous, it requires clearer sight, plainer sense of responsibility, and more enlightened intelligence. The segregation of poverty helps to conceal its miseries; industrial and mechanical developments make work less personal, and specialisation destroys part of the joy in work. New conditions of life have sprung up, which need a new spirit of enterprise. The future, revealed in the faces of our children, reminds us that our goal lies beyond us, and that even in the nightfall of our life we must prepare a shelter for our descendants. We do not build with the same materials if the house is to last but a few years as we do if it is to last for centuries. V We must not think that, in developing in ourselves the love of life--of the whole of life--we create a greater fear of death. Our life is not in proportion to its length. Very short lives often give out more perfume than long barren existences. The important thing is not to grow old, but to fill up all one’s days until the last, knowing well that the last will come and give to our life its finished form. For the acceptance of the whole of life includes the acceptance of death. _Figaro_ opened recently a rather curious discussion among the doctors, which must interest all of us, since it is true that we all must die. It inquired of a certain number of “princes of science,” members of the Academy of Medicine, professors of faculties, eminent surgeons and practitioners, all men with degrees and honors, concerning the following case. A doctor is attending a patient, and finds that the illness is incurable, that the end is only a question of months, of days, or of hours. Must he say so? Must he tell the patient himself, or only the family, and in the latter case, which member of it? The answers were almost all the same. They might have borrowed the epigram from Pascal: “Men, not being able to cure death, poverty, or ignorance, imagine they can make themselves happy, by not thinking about them; that is the only consolation they have been able to discover for so many ills.” Our doctors, unable to do away with death, think they can do away with the thought of it. They chloroform us morally, in preparation for the operation of the Fates.