The lies that have been put
into their mouths for this purpose are endless. The prime minister,
whose last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies with a
magnificent apothegm on his lips,--manufactured by a reporter. Addison
gets up a _tableau_ and utters an admirable sentiment,--or somebody
makes the posthumous dying epigram for him. The incoherent babble of
green fields is translated into the language of stately sentiment. One
would think, all that dying men had to do was to say the prettiest
thing they could,--to make their rhetorical point, and then bow
themselves politely out of the world.
Worse than this is the torturing of dying people to get their evidence
in favor of this or that favorite belief. The camp-followers of
proselyting sects have come in at the close of every life where they
could get in, to strip the languishing soul of its thoughts, and carry
them off as spoils. The Roman Catholic or other priest who insists on
the reception of his formula means kindly, we trust, and very commonly
succeeds in getting the acquiescence of the subject of his spiritual
surgery.
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