The attention of the popular mind to death is not only at variance with the attitude of the accepted leaders of thought, still honestly agnostic, but is contradictory to its own attitude of only a few years ago, when death was still the isolated, not the average, experience of the average person. In the old days the bereaved was a little apart, a little abnormal. We were always glad when our friends set aside their mourning and became again like the rest of us. For an everyday man or woman, death was a subject a little indecorous; they had a little of the old Hebrew abhorrence of it which made the Jews regard its presence as a defilement of their Passover; yet it was a young man's dying which, in the history of religion, re-created that Passover by the promise of a resurrection.

The new, enforced familiarity with fate varies, according to the individual, all the way from uneasiness at the intrusion of the spiritual upon his smugness, to an absorption so engrossing that some of us feel that we cannot go on living one day longer until we have decided what is the relation of dying to every hour of existence. In terms of immediate living, the New Death is the constant influence upon us of the boys who have passed. All the ramifications of experience and of endeavor growing out of our attitude toward our young dead must become a new psychological factor in the world's thought and action. The whole subject is still as formless as it is forceful, but it is already possible to analyze some of its obvious characteristics and to conjecture some possible results to public life and to private thinking. Like many other felt, but not yet formulated, influences of the war, the potentialities of the New Death are still to be discovered, as, led by grief, the souls of survivors seek to

The New Death, now entering history as an influence, is so far mainly an immense yearning receptivity, an unprecedented humility of both brain and heart toward all the implications of survival. It is a great intuition entering into the lives of the simple, the sort of people who have made the past and will make the future. It does not matter in the least whether or not the intellectuals share this intuition, and it does not matter whether or not the intuition is true, or whether future generations, returned to the lassitude of peace, shall again deny the present perceptions; what does matter is the effect upon emergent public life and private of the fact that everyday men and women are believing that the dead live.

These everyday men and women are not looking to their former teachers, the scientist and the theologian, for light upon death. In the urgency of grief we turn instinctively to more authoritative solace than either of these promises. Before 1914 we had seen the disestablishment of the Church as an unquestioned arbiter; since 1914 we have seen the disestablishment of science as an unquestioned arbiter.

Throughout this testing by tragedy, however, we still pay science this much of respect: we continue to practice its methods, while we no longer give blind acquiescence to its conclusions. In the immense desolations of grief to-day, each person must find his own answer to the supreme enigma. For this intellectual initiative the common man is far better prepared than he knew. Widespread education, widespread communication, have equipped the popular mind for mental achievement which materialism had diverted to grosser directions than it deserved.

Transcendent sorrow has now cleared a path for true progress. Science, permeating the commonest education, has given to each one of us a manner of practical approach to any subject that will always safeguard and secure all our advances into wisdom; but no longer can science convince us that we have not a soul when we feel it suffer so. It is impossible for ordinary people any longer to deny that spiritual facts require the exercise of spiritual faculties for their interpretation.

We therefore approach a new wisdom of death by enlisting every capacity we possess, intuitive as well as merely rational, and we seek light along every avenue of approach philosophy, poetry, science, theology old or new, even spiritism with all its perils. We test each step into the unknown pragmatically, scientifically, for we must have ease from grief if we are not to be paralyzed, and we must have power to remake our own lives and the life of the world in saner accord with eternal purposes, if in any way these can be ascertained. Always the motiving of this universal search is the same just so much knowledge of dying as will enable us to go on living through this horror. Instant consolation, instant reconstruction, we must attain, if the whole world is not in a moment to be tossed back into chaos. For countless centuries the world has been able to live by evasion: our energy for living has been based upon our ability to forget dying. To-day we wake to such havoc as can never in all the future be offset unless we discover how to make destruction itself the stimulus of an indestructible vigor.

This great popular pressing into the mystery is far too vital for any present crystallization into creed. Unlike the ancient and the medieval views, the New Death does not prefigure the circumstances of survival, while it more

and more accepts it. The New Death is experimental, humble; it investigates, it does not dogmatize. It practices rather than theorizes. It is also independent, personal; it is the sum total of an attitude lived rather than argued by millions of individuals, who in the intensity of their own experience hardly perceive how widespread is that experience. For the first time in history, immortality has become a practical issue for the common man to meet, or history will cease.

It is because of the intensity of their new need that people are turning less to their old masters, the theologians and the scientists, but with an awed docility are seeking illumination from those who are to-day the supreme critics of death our young men who are dying. These speak, these act, as men having authority, and the force of their influence on the world they have left cannot be calculated, so powerful are the reasons for this influence.

There is something strangely persistent about any unfulfilled life: it always leaves a curious sense of abnormality and waste, and a deep blind impulse somehow to give the aspirant young soul the earthly gifts it lacked. There is not a family which has ever lost a child which does not always have, as an undercurrent of its thoughts, conjectures of that child's development, and a conscious or unconscious adjustment to that child's desires. There is always this psychological continuing of an arrested life, and it is inevitably the more powerful, the more personality the dead youth had attained. The supreme example of this fact is seen in the Christian religion, for it was the force of a young man's death which established that religion; it was founded on the psychology of the universal instinct to fulfill an interrupted ministry as being the only outlet left to affection.

II

More young men, and these more articulate, more capable of inspired utterance, are seeing death to-day than ever before in all time. For one Byron of the past, how many poets and artists and musicians are at this time defending the things of the spirit! The interpretation of fate by such men may be more valuable than that of the aged, for they see dissolution in sharper contrast to vigor; the colors of death are to them more accurate perhaps than to older men whose faculties are duller, and to whom life, being experienced, is not so alluring in promise. The chief value of the testimony of these young heroes, however, is not so much in the words they speak of death, but in the fact that they chose it. If self-preservation exists for the survival of something, may not selfimmolation exist for the survival of something? If so, what? We can only grope for an answer, but, groping, we still follow our boys who have passed, feeling that they alone have the right to lead us.

One approaches in reverence the revelations of trench autobiography, which, whether expressed in loftiest poetry or in homeliest slang, comprise the symposium of the sacrificed. The bulk of war autobiography increases daily, making quotation overwhelming, but the uniformity of its revelations is a truth no reader can escape. While his actions are supported by an immense comradeship, the thoughts of the soldier move in a great loneliness; therefore one must give full credit to the singular harmony of utterance, to the strange identity of faith, that so many diverse voices speak. Neither must one ever forget the surroundings in which these records were written; if these writers can succeed in believing the spirit superior to the body, surely,

of all men who ever loved, their creed is the most triumphant. We ourselves have shrunk at the mere footfall of the undertaker, at the waxen stateliness of a face once ruddy, at the thud of earth upon a seemly coffin; these circumstances have been enough to make our sensitiveness accept the finality of dissolution. None of us have seen a human body in actual decay, but merely because we know it does decay, we have been overwhelmed and have denied the soul's immortality. The boys upon the battlefields have seen the forms of their comrades rot before their eyes for months. What cowardice our old facile doubt seems, compared with the faith of those at the front! And cowardice even more craven seems our love of life, our reluctance to leave earth's treasures, when we perceive the passion of yearning that these men feel for the life they renounce. Was ever the poignancy of parenthood more touchingly expressed than in Harold Chapin's letters to his baby son? And did ever homesickness become so divine a thing as on the battlelines of Europe? Tortured with the sights and cries and odors of carnage, and yearning in every fibre for the earth they relinquished, the boys of the world have marched unfaltering to their destruction, rebuking in their every gesture our easy despair, and leaving behind them words of confidence coercing us to conviction.

In addition to the force of their idealism and of their written words, the carriage of these young heroes immediately before death must have a peculiar illumination. That multitudes of soldiers have met their end, not only with serenity, but with a high-hearted gayety, is a fact of overwhelming evidence. This hilarity of heroism is the highest proof a man can give of his certainty that soul is more enduring than body; and exhibited so often at

the very instant of passing, may be, to the open-minded, argument for some strange reassurance from that other side. Surely conviction of immortality from those who have seen the hideousness of carnage in a degree in which no other men in all history have seen it, is a conviction deserving our respectful study.

What the boys who are gone have said and have practiced in regard to dying, what we who are left can add to their vivid vision from the wisdom of our experience of loss in this combined testimony of the dead and of the bereaved lies the material for one who tries to formulate from contemporary evidence the elements characterizing the New Death, elements all readily seen to be only different aspects of the effort to discover a set of standards by which to weigh what is destructive against what is deathless.

The first characteristic to impress one is the directness of approach to realities formerly shunned, or obscured by ceremonies, or too elaborately interpreted by theology, or too elaborately denied by science. Lashed by grief to realization, the plain man recalls with wonder his old indifference. The former evasiveness is impossible. Each man is testing for himself the old symbolism, the old creed, the old agnosticism, for its vitality. For the new world to be built, only so much of the old world's ritual and philosophy of death can hold as can bear the purging of such grief as the old world never knew.

Both the bereaved at home and the men at the front exhibit the same impulse to sift all ceremonies. One cannot fail to note in trench memoirs the soldier's utter indifference to the conventions associated with demise. There is everywhere to-day a tendency to examine all our ritual of dissolution, retaining only that which is essentially

beautiful and essentially true to our emerging convictions. Symbolism has a more direct relation to our conduct than we are always ready to grant. The old conventions of burial and of grief over-emphasized the importance of the physical and over-emphasized the importance of individual loss, and so were in themselves an obscuration of the new light we are seeking upon the marble face of death. The growing practice of wearing white rather than black for mourning, or of continuing the habitual colors of one's dress; the movement for placing upon the service flag a gold star in memory of a soldier killed, are attempts toward a fresher and truer symbolism expressing our growing protest against the depression and paralysis too often resultant upon the passage of a loved one from the known world to the unknown.

III

The present force of individual initiative in examining all the former creeds and customs of dissolution is closely connected with another characteristic of the New Death. The practical trend of the new inquiry into the unseen causes us to seek light from each other in a way we never did before. The new attitude toward death is unlike the old in being the result of universal bereavement and of such a sharing of sympathy as the human soul has never before in all history experienced. In former days people offered condolence genuinely but awkwardly. Sorrow was a loneliness which only the comparatively few who had tasted it understood. We were always a little embarrassed by people who talked easily, even cheerily, of the dead, as if perhaps these had not gone far from us. The old death, like The old death, like many other things remade by the war, was too often selfabsorbed, self-pitying. The old death

was a barrier rather than a bond; the New Death is a universal welding of mutual compassion.

More conspicuous than shared sympathy, as an element of the New Death, is the shared resilience of these millions of mourners. The first response to the enigma of that majestic mystery now dominating uncounted homes is not in theories, but in actions, in a great unargued energy. How different from the paralysis of bereavement too readily condoned in the old days! Our boys have died, therefore we must live, is an arresting and illogical conclusion, but surely it is the one which for four years has actuated both the armies and the households of Europe, and is now becoming more and more our own chief inspiration.

The magnificent recuperative promise of that clarion cry, 'After the war,' does it not draw its first impulse from the ideals of our young dead, ideals we dare not for an instant discontinue? Their example lies upon the survivors like a command that no desolation of grief dares deny. Is not this splendid, dogged hopefulness, on the surface as mad and monstrous as the suffering that has engendered it, a strange, unearthly tribute to the powers of the soul, and a mysterious reassurance for the new world which shall rise from to-day's destruction? We are discovering a strange self-security in those strongholds of the heart which utter loss has rendered unassailable; we are experiencing a strange liberation from the age-old fear of fate.

The word death has for each of us a two-fold meaning; it implies our own passing and the loss of our loved ones. Most of us have a wholesome carelessness of our own fate, but an oversolicitude in regard to those dear to us. The new adaptation of living to dying, if it is to bear the test of the new world's needs, must afford us both a better

adjustment of our own mundane existence to its post-mundane possibilities, so that we shall each regard his life with more respect as being perhaps not too surely finite, and also a new enfranchisement from paralyzing anxiety in regard to those we love. During a long century of materialism, we have always been handicapped by the fear of loss, until in a moment of time, by a supreme irony, all fear has been swept away by utter desolation. Evolution teaches that survival depends on the power of adaptation to environment; is not the effort of each nation to reconstruct this destruction constant evidence of the vast impulse of the human race to discover an adjustment of life to death that shall make for endurance rather than decay?

The immediate expression of this vast impulse to rebuild is for individual men and women the revaluation of humble daily life. More and more each of us feels too small to grasp the world-issues of to-day, yet at the same time finds inactivity unbearable. We turn to the nearest task in desperate desire to make it somehow count for relief and restoration to a war-ridden world. The humdrum suddenly stands forth in beauty, dignified by new motives. Always our attitude is inextricably influenced by the words and the conduct of the boys whose battle-hours are continually before our imaginations. They have been driven to discover what remains to them of joy in spite of the tumult, just as we at home, agonized by each morning's newspaper, suddenly perceive the worth of many experiences too familiar to be prized until contrasted with horror. If in the fire and the mud 'out there,' men can discover things to give them joy and faith, surely we at home can emulate a little of their serenity. As we read the records of their hearts, as we meet corresponding experience in our own,