Bozeman Avant Courier

Painless Death,

Chief-Justice Chase, says the Boston Traveller, was as fortunate in death as he had been in life. The immediate cause of his death was rupture of the cerebral artery, whence followed a rush of blood to the brain; and as the rupture took place when he was asleep, he never knew pain, passing calmly away.

Mere dying, it is probable, never is painful. But the circumstances that attend death sometimes are very painful, yet men suffer as much in cases from which they recover as they do in those that terminate fatally. A strictly natural death would make no more impression on a man than was made on him by his birth. Nature is not such a blunderer as to make the inevitable a source of pain that can do no good. What is disagreeable in dying is the result of violations of Nature's laws.

To die is simply to sleep, death being the rounding of life as Shakespeare says. To the properly constituted mind, death is no more horrible than is sleep; but then the properly constituted has not yet been found. Even those who die calmly or gladly, do so because they have found life a Gordian knot, which can be cut only by the dart of Death, and not because they have philosophically convinced themselves that it is a matter of no moment.

Be a man the most confirmed of believers, or the most confirmed of unbelievers, he must have some doubt—and where there is no doubt, be it ever so small, there must be fear. So when one departs in his sleep he avoids the last perplexity, that which awaits on the death-bed of the Christian as well as on the death-bed of the philosopher—which was felt by Adam, and which will be felt by the last of Adam's descendants. Human egotism has not yet reached to that point in which death can be a matter of absolute indifference, and probably it will never reach it.