Rensselaer Republican, Volume 23, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 September 1890 — INGALLS ON LIFE AND DEATH. [ARTICLE]

INGALLS ON LIFE AND DEATH.

The Doom of Humanity and the Universe—The Future Hope. From the Eulogy on Senator Beck, Pronounced August 23. The right to live is, in human estimation, the most sacred, the most inviolable, the most inalienable. . The joy of living in such a splendidarid luminous day as this is inconceivable. Toexietiß—exultation . -To live for- - ever is our sublimest hope. Hnnihilation, extinction, and eternal death are the forebodings of despair To know, to love, to achieve, to triumph, to confer happiness, to alleviate mysery, is rapture. The greatest crime and the severest penalty known to human law is the sacrifice and forfeiture of life. And yet we are all under sentence of .death. Other events may hr may not occur. Other conditions may or may not exist. We may be rich or poor; we may’ be learned or ignorant; we may be happy or wretched; but we all must die. The verdict has been pronounced by the inexorable decree of an omnipotent tribunal. Without trial or opportunity for defense; with no knowledge of the accuser, or the nature and cause of the without being confronted with the witnesses against us, we have been summoned to the bar of life and condemned to death. There is no west of error, no review. There is neither exculpation nor appeal. All must be relinquished. Beauty and deformity, good and evil, virtue and vice, share the same relentless fate. The tender mother cries passionately for mercy r for her first born, but there is no clemency. The craven felon sullenly prays for a moment in which to be aneled, but there is no reprieve. The soul helplessly beats it wings against bars, shudders, and. disappears. The proscription extends alike to the individual and the type. Nation* die’ and races expire. Humanity ' itself is destined to extinction. Sooner or hiter it is the instruction of science that the energy of the earth will be expended, and it will become incapable of supporting life. A group of feeble and pallin survivors in some sheltered valley in the tropics will behold the sun sink below the horizon and the pitiless stars glitter in the midnight eky. —The last man will perish, and the sun will rise upon an earth without an inhabitant. Its atmosphere, its seas, its life and heat, will vanish, and the planet wilt' be 'an idle cinder uselessly spinning in its orbit. Every hour some world die', unnoticed in the firmament; some sun smoulders to embers and ashes on the hearthstone of infinite spqce, *nd the mighty maze of systems sweeps ceaselessly onward in its Voyage of doom to remorseless and unsparing destruction. With the disappearance of man from the earth, all traces of his existence will be lost. The palaces, towers, and temples he has reared, the institutions he has established, the cities he has < builded, the books he has written, the creeds he has constructed, the pnilosophies he has formulated—all science, art, literature and knowledge will be obliterated and engulfed in empty and vacant oblivion. The gr< at globe itself, ———— -- Yea, all whieh it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a nek behind. There is an Intelligence so vast and enduring' that the flaming intervals between the birth and death of universes is no more than the flash of fireflies above the meadows of summer; a colossal power by which these stupendous orbs are launched in the abyss, like bubblesi.blown by a child in the. morning sun, and whose sense of justice and reason can not be less potential than those immutable statutes that are the law of being to the creatures He has made, and which compel, them to declare that if the only object* of creation is destruction, if infinity is the theater of an uninterrupted series of irreparable calamities, if the final cause of life is death, then time is an inexplicable tragedy, and eternity an illogical and indefensible catastrophe. No, Mr. President, this obsequy is for the quick and not for the dead. It is a strain of triumnh. It is an affirmation to those who survive, that as our departed associate, contemplating a«< the close of his life the monument of good deeds he had erected, more enduring than brass, and loftier than the pyramids of kings, might exclaim with the Roman poet, “Non omnis moriar.” So, turning to the silent and unknown future he could rely with just and reasonable confidence upon that most impressive and momentous assurance ever delivered to the human race: “He , that believeth in me, though he were ! dead yet shall he live; and whosoever . liveth and believeth in me shall never die.”