Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. There are few salient points of difference in the forms employed in conducting the obsequies of a Christian aud those of an agnostic. Setting aside the prayers which occupy so prominent a place in the burial rites of believers, the ceremonies differ but slightly. The accompaniments are similar in both cases: music, flowers, panegyric, tears — tears flowing as freely and unreconcilably over the body of the one as the other. Is it not a little singular, indeed, that no more intense woe, no deeper gloom apparently attends the burial of the sceptic, surrounded by sceptics holding no hope of a future life, than that which clouds the death-chamber of one dying in the grand belief of a glorious immortality, and surrounded by Christians professing full faith in a near and joyous reunion beyond the grave ? Is it, perhaps, that that loudly and boldly expressed faith is a little insecure ? That, notwithstanding protest and boast, at the awful issues of life, doubt will creep in to insinuate, in whispers too low for ourconsciousness to acknowledge, that the unproven is ever uncertain, that there is ever — and must of necessity ever continue to be — a dark and gloomy possibility involved in the snapping of the golden cord ? Why, else, does the Christian mourn so long and so inconsolably over a parting which he claims is to result in such wondrous consequences to his friend? If the passage from life to death is felt so assuredly to so brilliantly advantage him who undertakes it, why should the short separation which it involves cause such infinitely deeper grief than the earthly partings which are every-day occurrences of life ? We make no bitter moans over the separations neces- sited by material preferment. The conventionally darkened parlor in Forty-second Street ...