IS DEATH PAINFUL?

Temuka Leader, Issue 7554, 18 April 1914, Page 5

IS DEATH PAINFUL?

A. C. BENSON'S EXPERIENCE. ; Every body, must die; nnd that tru. ism explains thu eager interest with .vliick the correspondence in '"the limes" on "The Fains of Death" is jHjiug followed. J'radically all '• , the contributors- - vgice that the process of dying is Jiiinlesx, or nearly so ; and that view is corroborated by Mr A. C. ISemon, n-esident of Magdalene Gollege, Gambridge, who once for twenty minutes ivas°at grapples with death, and was not wholly pleased when he was savkl ! Here is tho story as told to a London "Evening Nows" reprosonlaLive :~ ' The encounter did not coma alter long sickness to a 'body and mind weakened by anguish. Mr Benson was in the fulness of his health and yigaur when the pit—literally the pit—, opened under his feet, and he realised that the last things were come upon him. And not only did he experience no terror, but when the unexpected—the impossible, as it geemed—happened and he was rescued, for a little while he was almost sorry to know that after all he had not escaped from this troublesome world. , "'You must understand," he began, ' "that my book, 'The Gate of Death,' is; not a record of personal experience', j It is an imaginative work, founded on circumstances that have been told mo by others, and cast into the auto- ; biographical form. I "But I have had a real and very close encounter with death. iYou will find the story of it in 'The Faoe of Death/ which is contained in the vol ume of collected pieces called 'Along the Road.' ' | "A STRANGE ROARING." "This is how it happened. I was mountaineering with a friend in 18%, and we were crossing the Dnter-flmch-horn glacier ;, my friend, the guide, and myself all roped together. Suddenly the snow fell from under my feet, and I went down with a crash into a crevasse. "My first feeling was amusement; I was sure that they would soon have me out. Then I saw I was hanging over an immense depth ; it was as if I swung in air from the vault of Westminster Abfbey. Far below I could hear the noise of a rushing stream. "They began to try to pull me up. J?ut the ice-walls of the crevasse sloped towards one another;; the more they pulled the more firmly I. was held tight against the ice. My friend crossed over to the other sidei; they tried again to haul me up, but they could not do it. It was certain that I must die, "I hung like this for twenty minutos ; and all that while I had no single thought of fear. I was an Eton housemaster then, and I remember hoping that my death would causo no inconvenience in tihe house. I didn't see all my past life pass in review before me. I hoped I should become unconscious before death. "I was being slowly strangled, by'tho rope that was tightening about my lungs. . There was a strange roaring in my ears ; that was the noise of my own breathing. At last the guide risked his life by coming to the edge of the crevasse. He cut the ice away, and they drew me up. And for a few minutes I. was not wholly pleased.' I felt that I had gone through the door—almost—and yet 1 had been plucked back. Yet I should not call myself a very courageous man; I think I am a sensitive man 'AS HIS FATHER MED. "But I believe that my experience is the experience of almost,all. I know a hospital nurse who had seen hundreds of deathiqeds, and aha says that she can hardly recollect one instance of a person who was afraid to "Still, after all, death remains the one terror. I wish I might die as uny father died. You remember he was in Hawarden Church. Soon after the service ib'egan my mother noticed he his hand across his eyes as if; his sight were slightly dimmed. (Then he knelt down, and when the Absolution had been pronounced he was dead—without a sound and without, a stru|g{ gle. • He had merely «easad toi bi'eatna it would be a great, consolation *»to die like that.

"I hope that I may die dressed in my ordinary dress in; the middle o£my, ordinary work. I don't want bed clothes and medicine .'bottles, and every, body sent for. "J. suppose that eighty or ninety per cent, of dying people don't know they are dying. They feel week and sink into a coma. Even a patient in the last stages of canoer does not know, rthe date of his death ; ho is not in that awful position of the condemned man, who sees tho day of his irrevocable and dreadful death coming nearer and nearer.

"Or Arnold, of course, knew that h« ■was dying, and died, magnificently. And Kingsley, too, he was fine; ho said that ho looked forward to death! with a reverent curiosity. And I am told that the deathbed of F. Myers was very beautiful; it was as if ho were inarching onward joyfully to a great and noble triumph." . THE OTHER,WORLD. We talked a little of those hopes and consolations in ihe hour of death thai religion offers to the faithful. MiBenson would not admit that religion

van decaying, though, as he said,) people are not so certain as to what 9 poing to happen to them, alter loath us uhey wore in the past ages. | le agreed that, so far, physical re-1 earch had failed to provide "scionti-1 ic" evidence of the persistence ofhu- ( nan personality after death. And ho j igreod, too, that so great was tho ulf—magnum 'chaos—fixed 'between his, ourj world of time and spate©; (Old he ao-eloss life of the world to come, hat it was highly improbable that my logical of "scientific" commumca-, ion could pass from the one to the )th«r. ~...• i • i , "Perhaps," I said, ">t is in high; uusio that one comes nearest _to ■ leaven," and Mr Benson allowod that jhis might well be so. | There are two remarkable utterincos in Maeterlinck's "La Mort.' rim former declares that death has anly one terror,: the terror of that unknown world into which we are cast ,vhen we die. This is towards the berinning of the book ; but on the last Pases-the author declares that he can imagine no more awful nor irremediable fate than to be tho inhabitant of a world that contained no mysteries-, to which there was no unknown, no unsearchable beyond.