trials, heaven's merciful medicine for the mentally and spiritually
diseased--determines, instead of manfully taking arms against a sea of
troubles, to let the curtain drop, and, as it fancies, end them. It
destroys the body, but finds itself precisely as much alive mentally
as before. It had an appointed life-term determined by an intricate
web of prior causes, which its own wilful sudden act cannot shorten.
That term must run out its appointed sands. You may smash the lower
half of the hand hour-glass, so that the impalpable sand shooting from
the upper bell is dissipated by the passing aerial currents as it
issues; but that stream will run on, unnoticed though it remain, until
the whole store in that upper receptacle is exhausted.

So you may destroy the body, but not the appointed period of sentient
existence, foredoomed (because simply the effect of a plexus of
causes) to intervene before the dissolution of the personality; this
must run on for its appointed period.

This is so in other cases, _e.g._, those of the victims of accident or
violence; they, too, have to complete their life-term, and of these,
too, we may speak on another occasion--but here it is sufficient to
notice that, whether good or bad, their mental attitude at the time of
death alters wholly their subsequent position. They, too, have to wait
on within the "Region of Desires" until their wave of life runs on to
and reaches its appointed shore, but they wait on, wrapped in dreams
soothing and blissful, or the reverse, according to their mental and
moral state at, and prior to the fatal hour, but nearly exempt from
further material temptations, and, broadly speaking, incapable (except
just at the moment of real death) of communicating _scio motu_ with
mankind, though not wholly beyond the possible reach of the higher
forms of the "Accursed Science," Necromancy. The question is a