264 Luck, or Cunning ? 
seem to me not, indeed, to take away any very considerable 
part of the sting from death ; this should not:be attempted 
or desired, for with the sting of death the sweets of life 
are inseparably bound up so that neither can be weakened 
without damaging the other. Weaken the fear of death, 
and the love of life would be weakened. Strengthen it, 
and we should cling to life even more tenaciously than we 
do. But though death must always remain as a shock and 
change of habits from which we must naturally shrink— 
still it is not the utter end of our being, which, until lately, 
it must have seemed to those who have been unable to 
accept the grosser view of the resurrection with which we 
were familiarised in childhood. We too now know that 
though worms destroy this body, yet in our flesh shall we 
so far see God as to be still in Him and of Him—biding our 
time for a resurrection in a new and more glorious body ; 
and, moreover, that we shall be to the full as conscious of 
this as we are at present of much that concerns us as closely 
as anything can concern us. 
The thread of life cannot be shorn between successive 
generations, except upon grounds which will in equity 
involve its being shorn between consecutive seconds, and 
fractions of seconds. On the other hand, it cannot be left 
unshorn between consecutive seconds without necessita- 
ting that it should be left unshorn also beyond the grave, 
as well as in successive generations. Death is as salient a 
feature in what we call our life as birth was, but it is no 
more than this. As a salient feature, it is a convenient 
epoch for the drawing of a defining line, by the help of 
which we may better grasp the conception of life, and think 
it more effectually, but it is a fagon de parler only ; it is, as 
I said in ‘“‘ Life and Habit,’’* “ the most inexorable of all. 
conventions,” but our idea of it has no correspondence 
with eternal underlying realities. 
Finally, we must have evolution ; consent is too spon- 
* Page 53. 
