he hopes that it will be a birth of something that he aspired to be and
fell short of. He knows that it is through death and rebirth that
this corruptible shall become incorruptible, and this mortal put on
immortality. Practise as you will on his ignorance, his fears, and his
imagination, with bribes of paradises and threats of hells, there is
only one belief that can rob death of its sting and the grave of its
victory; and that is the belief that we can lay down the burden of our
wretched little makeshift individualities for ever at each lift towards
the goal of evolution, which can only be a being that cannot be improved
upon. After all, what man is capable of the insane self-conceit of
believing that an eternity of himself would be tolerable even to
himself? Those who try to believe it postulate that they shall be made
perfect first. But if you make me perfect I shall no longer be myself,
nor will it be possible for me to conceive my present imperfections (and
what I cannot conceive I cannot remember); so that you may just as well
give me a new name and face the fact that I am a new person and that
the old Bernard Shaw is as dead as mutton. Thus, oddly enough, the
conventional belief in the matter comes to this: that if you wish to
live for ever you must be wicked enough to be irretrievably damned,
since the saved are no longer what they were, and in hell alone do
people retain their sinful nature: that is to say, their individuality.
And this sort of hell, however convenient as a means of intimidating
persons who have practically no honor and no conscience, is not a fact.
Death is for many of us the gate of hell; but we are inside on the way
out, not outside on the way in. Therefore let us give up telling one
another idle stories, and rejoice in death as we rejoice in birth; for
without death we cannot be born again; and the man who does not wish
to be born again and born better is fit only to represent the City of
London in Parliament, or perhaps the university of Oxford.