The problem of life is not so strange when taken in its relation to things around us. The things which to us seem incomprehensible are often so merely from our own ignorance or failure to look at them in the light of existing environments. The questions of life and death, could we grasp them with the myriad of causes before and after, which go with and are a part of them, might even themselves be understood. Of death we know one thing which should rob it of all fear, and that is that, as our coming into the world was painless and unconscious to us, so shall our going out be; and that as we had no choice in the matter of our coming in, so shall we have none in the matter of our going out, and that as we are a link in the cause of events, we should accept our position with the cheerful fortitude of one upon whom a task has been placed by an unseen Creator, relying upon the justice of His wisdom to see that it is not greater than we can bear. For in the bearing of it lie all our growth and all the strength and nobility which shall fix our place in the life to come. It seems a paradox, indeed, to us to think that we must die to live; yet if we look around us we may see where this same principle is carried out in all the relations of the world; that we grow not by what we get, but by what we give; that we are developed not through pleasure and play, but through hard knocks and hard work; that we are softened and ripened not through happiness, but through pain and sorrow; that use is growth, and idleness is decay, and that from stone to star and from plant to planet, disintegration is the law of God, that greater things may be built upon the ashes of the past, and a grander life evolved from the crucifixions of the present.