This is one side of the picture. On the other hand it cannot be questioned that the strong convictions and impressive ceremonies, even of the most superstitious faith, have consoled and strengthened multitudes in their last moments, and in the purer and more enlightened forms of Christianity death now wears a very different aspect from what it did in the teaching of mediæval Catholicism, or of some of the sects that grew out of the Reformation. Human life ending in the weakness of old age and in the corruption of the tomb will always seem a humiliating anti-climax, and often a hideous injustice. The belief in the rightful supremacy of conscience, and in an eternal moral law redressing the many wrongs and injustices of life, and securing the ultimate triumph of good over evil; the incapacity of earth and earthly things to satisfy our cravings and ideals; the instinctive revolt of human nature against the idea of annihilation, and its capacity for affections and attachments, which seem by their intensity to transcend the limits of earth and carry with them in moments of bereavement a persuasion or conviction of something that endures beyond the grave,--all these things have found in Christian beliefs a sanction and a satisfaction that men had failed to find in Socrates or Cicero, or in the vague Pantheism to which unassisted reason naturally inclines. Looking, however, on death in its purely human aspects, the mourner should consider how often in a long illness he wished the dying man could sleep; how consoling to his mind was the thought of every hour of peaceful rest; of every hour in which the patient was withdrawn from consciousness, insensible to suffering, removed for a time from the miseries of a dying life. He should ask himself whether these intervals of insensibility were not on the whole the happiest in the illness--those which he would most have wished to multiply or to prolong. He should accustom himself, then, to think of death as sleep--undisturbed sleep--the only sleep from which man never wakes to pain.