death, through a false idea that they shall revive in another body. sick man who has lain in bed for whole months, and gives him courage to bear the discomforts of illness for a time longer; if the promise of freedom causes such joy to the prisoner that he bears much easier the severities of his prison, how much more should not a believing Christian be encouraged by the certain and infallible hope of a resurrection to an eternal, immortal, and perfectly happy life; so that he should bear with consolation and joy for a time longer the miseries of this short life, and willingly suffer with his suffering Lord? There have been people, and it is said there are still some in England, and especially in India, who believe that as soon as a man dies his soul does not go into eternity, but enters again into a human body and begins life afresh. This superstition makes its advocates so reckless that soldiers rush fearlessly into the midst of swords and spears, fire and bullets, and many merchants if they become bankrupts put an end to themselves at once without hesitation by hanging or shooting themselves. What does it matter, they think, if the body is wounded or mangled here? Elsewhere I shall get another, and perhaps a better one than this. And although I die by a violent death here, I shall come to life again in another country and begin a new existence.
The mere belief in the immortality of the soul takes away all fear of death. Shown by an example. Seneca writes that Cato, one of the most renowned of the ancient Romans, after he had read a certain book of the philosopher Plato, thought so little of his life that when he saw the freedom of Rome on the point of being destroyed, and the commonwealth going to ruin and likely to be trampled under the feet of an emperor, took a sword and without the least hesitation stabbed himself to the heart with it, lest he should live after his country had lost her freedom. Some of his friends ran up, took the sword out of his body and bound the wound; but they could not alter his determination; for after having rested for a time, Cato, summoning up all his remaining strength, tore off the bandages, and widened the wound with his own unarmed hands; thus not so much giving up his magnanimous spirit, as compelling it to escape through the wide gate he opened for it,[1] are the words of Seneca. I know well that moralists are not agreed in their opinion of this act of Cato’s. Some of them say that his contempt of death arose from a weakness and cowardice of mind, caused by the fear lest the triumphing Caesar might treat him as a slave, and that it could by no means be traced to the bravery or forti-
- ↑ Spiritum non emisit, sed ejecit.
