MELBA’S CREED.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLV, Issue 288, 9 November 1925, Page 2

MELBA’S CREED.

“THE TRUE ETERNAL ME.” LIFE AFTER DEATH. LONDON, Oct. 25. Dame Nellie Melba, in an article in the Weekly Dispatch, entitled “When I’m Dead,” writes:— “ ‘Grinning at tho roots of the daisies.’ What did that mean? Well, I remember when I heard the brutal phrase. I was a child walking in the Australian bush, listening to grownups discussing a dying acquaintance. The phrase burnt itself into my childish mentality, causing a grotesquely vivid and frightening picture in my independent mind, and caused an early, silent rebellion against my Presbyterian parents’ ' unbending creed, with its Scottish gloom and conventional heavens and hells. I couldn’t believe that they would really burn in hell. I couldn’t believe that God would be so cruel.

“I always instinctively believed in a life after death. I cannot believe’ that God, Who painted the rose, hung the stars in the summer night, and breathed eternal music into the sea, is capable of mocking creatures by denying them immortality. “I know the best in me will live and the worst die. There may be fires to pass through and tempests to face, but there is something that fire cannot bum nor storm quench. Call it the soul, the ego, the astral body—what you will. 1 call it the true eternal me, Nellie Melba.”