Life is eternal. We should find this out, and begin the demonstration thereof. Beauty and goodness are immortal. Let us then shape our views of Life into loveliness, freshness, and continuity, instead of into age and ugliness. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”
Acute and chronic beliefs reproduce their own types in the lingering or less stubborn forms of old age, sickness, and sin. The acute belief of age comes on at a remote period, and does not last as long as the chronic belief.
I have seen age regain two of the elements it had lost, sight and teeth. A lady of eighty-five, whom I knew, had a return of sight. Another lady, at ninety, had new teeth, — incisors, cuspids, bicuspids, and one molar. A gentleman, at sixty, had retained his full set of upper and lower teeth, without a decaying cavity.
Man, having birth, maturity, and decay, is like an animal or vegetable, — the animal unfit to live, and the vegetable subject to laws of decadence. If man were dust in his earliest stage of existence, we might admit the hypothesis that he returns eventually to his primitive condition; but he was never more nor less than man. Rightly says Longfellow's Psalm of Life,
| Dust thou art, to dust returnest, |
| Was not spoken of the Soul. |
If man flickers out in death, or springs from nothingness into being, there must be an instant, sometime, when Jehovah is without completeness, when there is no reflection of Mind or Soul.
