Our religious devotion is essentially buoyant, even joyous. The sorrows of life which are not the direct and indirect results of indiscretions, and violations of natural laws, we regard as an inheritance and not a punishment, and we endeavor in all conceivable ways to lighten them and make them easier to bear. For those in sickness among us, the hand of love and sympathy is never absent; and among the firm and undisturbed convictions of philosophic thought, death is only a regret and never a terror. Your creeds administer to the final end in all ways to a point of agony; they have ingeniously devised a theory of horrors for it, out of which has been made to come their chief sustenance and support. The path of life which they declare as the only one leading into the promised eternity of bliss, is the tortuous and difficult footway winding like a maze among the shadows of their churches. Although attentively guided throughout in this prescribed journey of life by your ecclesiastical teachers, and your entrance and exit made difficult without their help, yet, by the very nature of their doctrines, they could only bestow upon you at the last scene of all a torturing doubt. We have promoted the serenity of death by removing as far as possible its sorrow. With us, the individual in his last moments is not overcome with any sympathetic dread of that approaching suffering for the wants of life among dependents, which so often couples the agony of separation with an overwhelming sense of despair, as your society is constituted. The end comes placidly to us, in the belief that as we came from the Deity, so in the last we go back to Him; that the life beyond must be a higher life, because the moral sense grows constantly within us; and that the region ahead of us must be a free, open, and hospitable one, with no agonizing barriers separating families and friends, because, in the growth of our tenderness and attachment to each other, we can safely predict the evolution of a better and happier state.