Unfortunately, there has been a very great tendency to make capital of
various kinds out of dying men's speeches. 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, but do not let us
take the testimony of people who are in the worst condition to form
opinions as evidence of the truth or falsehood of that which they accept.
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