IS DEATH BUT CHANGE? 395 



ation of the dead body remains intact, and that we 

 can trace the development of the butterfly in the 

 chrysaHs, while we cannot see how the spirit is pre- 

 pared for its new life, as its old body gets worn out 

 with age : the change in the one case only seems 

 castastrophic, in the other it really is. 



Such objections owe their undeniable plausibility 

 to the deficiencies of our knowledge and the gross- 

 ness of our perceptions. But for these there might 

 be some hope of our understanding that from a 

 spiritual point of view the dead body is really just 

 as empty as the chrysalis, a meaningless mass of 

 machinery, from which the motive force has been 

 withdrawn ; but as its emptiness is spiritual, and not 

 visible and palpable, we fail to see the parallelism. 



And so again it might be, if we lived more wisely, 

 that the body would not be outworn before the 

 spirit wearied of its life on earth, or before it had 

 prepared for itself a spiritual tenement, with which, 

 at the summons of the angel of death, it would soar 

 aloft as gladly as the butterfly. 



But yet again, it may be asked, if death is but 

 change, why should the complex of phenomena we 

 call the body be left behind to decay and to pollute 

 a world from which the spirit has departed ? But 

 what would such critics have ? Would they prefer 

 that men at death should silently vanish away, and 

 be dissolved into air like ghosts ? Would this be a 

 more satisfactory mode of effecting one's exit ? And 

 does not, after all, the objection on the ground of 

 the decay of the body rest upon a misconception ? 

 There is no reason why the body should not be 

 preserved : death, as we now know, has nothing to 

 do with the decay of the body. For decay is a 

 phenomenon of life, not of death, of the life of the 



