Stones of Stumbling

er to meet this objection, it seems necessary to give some examples of philosophers whose dying moments were conspicuously without fear. We give these examples with reluctance, because of the affectation with which some of them are disfigured. Yet even from this affectation something may be learnt. By its very exaggeration it sets in a stronger light the painful, yet withal playful, acquiescence?the horrible joie, as Edmond Scherer has called it?with which some dying men have contrasted the permanence of natural forces with the decay of everything that lives, and have concluded that human life, with all its strength and beauty, is a tragi-comedy ending in a bathos. The nearest approach to such a sentiment that we have ourselves experiencedwas when the Spectator proclaimed that, according to Mr. Proctor, a comet seemed to meditate striking the sun, and that it was in nowise impossible that in fifteen years (the exact term of prolonged life assigned to Hezekiah) all life on our planet might be destroyed. However improbable it appeared that so overwhelming a calamity would be thus casually announced for the first time, it came sufficiently home to us to enable us to form an estimate of the manner in which such a catastrophe, if really impending, would affect us. And we own that what most impressed us was a sense of the irony of the universe: we thought we should feel (if the fatal concussion were imminent) that we had all been serving our fellows and Art and Scien...