He had, indeed, often talked of the immortality which some
achieve even in this world; but he had cheapened this, declaring it to be
an unsubstantial mockery, that could give no such comfort in the hour of
death as was unquestionably given by belief in heaven and hell.
Dr. Gurgoyle, however, had an equal horror, on the one hand, of anything
involving resumption of life by the body when it was once dead, and on
the other, of the view that life ended with the change which we call
death. He did not, indeed, pretend that he could do much to take away
the sting from death, nor would he do this if he could, for if men did
not fear death unduly, they would often court it unduly. Death can only
be belauded at the cost of belittling life; but he held that a reasonable
assurance of fair fame after death is a truer consolation to the dying, a
truer comfort to surviving friends, and a more real incentive to good
conduct in this life, than any of the consolations or incentives falsely
fathered upon the Sunchild.
He began by setting aside every saying ascribed, however truly, to my
father, if it made against his views, and by putting his own glosses on
all that he could gloze into an appearance of being in his favour. I
will pass over his attempt to combat the rapidly spreading belief in a
heaven and hell such as we accept, and will only summarise his contention
that, of our two lives--namely, the one we live in our own persons, and
that other life which we live in other people both before our reputed
death and after it--the second is as essential a factor of our complete
life as the first is, and sometimes more so.
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