SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

(especially for atheists, infidels, and skeptics)

By Vance Ferrell

Mother was filled with grief, and she knew not how to answer him. She replied, "Kenneth, I must go to the kitchen. I'll be right back." Hurrying there, she prayed, "Lord, show me how to answer Kenneth's question." Immediately, she knew how to express it.

Returning to Kenneth, Mother said, " Kenneth, you know how you have often played hard and gotten very tired in the evening? Then you have come into my room and climbed upon my bed and gone to sleep. Later your father carried you in his arms and put you in your own bed. In the morning you have awakened and found yourself in yur own room, without knowing how you got there."

Kenneth said, "Yes, Mother, I know that."

"Well, Kenneth," Mother continued, "death is something like that God's children. Jesus spoke of death as sleep. God's children go to sleep when they die. Later, at the resurrection, they will arise and be with Christ forever. Heaven is a wonderful place, Kenneth!"

Then the boy smiled and said, "Mother, I won't be afraid to die now. I'll just go to sleep and, later, wake up and be with Jesus forever. I know God will take care of me."

Henry Van Dyke wrote this very accurate statement: "Remember that what you possess in this world will be found at the day of your death and belong to someone else; what you are will be yours forever."

All that you own will someday be given to another, but your character--what you are--will determine you future destiny.

But now the entire picture changes. We leave the deathbeds of the Christians and visit the deathbeds of the atheists.

We have observed how men and women who have given themselves to God--who earnestly love and obey Him--have died. They confidently declared at the portals of death, "Yea, though though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me." (Psalm 23:4).

The Apostle Paul said, "To die is gain" (Phillippians 1:2) and "O death, where is thy sting?" (1 Corinthians 15:55). But to so many others death is a fearsome, dreadful thing.

• Aristotle wrote: "Death is a dreadful thing, for it is the end!"
• John Donne, the English author wrote: "Death is a bloody conflict, and no victory at last; a tempestuous sea, and no harbor at last; a slippery height, and no footing; a desperate fall, and no bottom!"
• Rousseau, the infidel, cried, "No man dares to face death without fear."
• Robert Ingersoll, the infidel, when standing at the grave of his brother, said, "Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive, in vain, to look beyond the height. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word."
• After the death of Alexander the Great, one of his generals, Ptolemy Philadelphus, inherited Egypt and lived a selfish life amid wealth and luxury. As he grew old, he was haunted by the fear of daeth, and even sought, in the Lore of the Egyptian priests, the secret of eternal life. One day, seeing a beggar lying content in the sun, Ptolemy said, "Alas, that I was not born one of these!'"
• We shall discover that the last words of the atheists are far different than those who love and honor their Creator. For example, when Phineas T. Barnum, the famous circus showman of yesteryear died in his 82nd year, his last words were a question about the big show's gate receipts at their latest Madison Square Garden performance. Then he was gone!
  

But, for most atheists, their concerns are far more dramatic. Here are the dying words of atheists:

• Voltaire, the most influential atheist of Europe in his day, cried out with his dying breath: "I am abandoned by God and man; I shall go to hell! I will give you half of what I am worth, if yu will give me six month's life."
• Honore Mirabeau, a leading political organizer of the French Revolution: "My sufferings are intolerable; I have in me a hundred years of life, but not a moment's courage. Give me more laudanum, that I may not think of eternity! O Christ, O Jesus Christ!"
• Mazarin, French cardinal and advisor to kings: "O my poor soul! What will become of thee? Whither will thou go?"
• Severus, Roman emperor who caused the death of thousands of Christians: "I have been everything, and everything is nothing!"
• Thomas Hobbes.the political philosopher and sceptic who corrupted some of England's great men: "If I had the whole world, I would give anything to live one day. I shall be glad to find a hold to creep out of the world at. I am about to take a fearful leap in the dark!"
• Caesar Borgia: "I have provided, in the course of my life, for everything except death; and now, alas! I am to die, although entirely unprepared!"
• Sir Thomas Scoff, chancellor of England: "Until this moment, I thought there was neither God nor hell; now I know and feel that there are both, and I am doomed to perdition by the just judgment of the Almighty!"
• Edward Gibbon, author of Delcine and Fall of the Roman Empire: "All is dark and doubtful!"
• Sir Francis Newport, the head of an English infidel club to those gathered around his deathbed: "You need not tell me therre is no God, for I know there is one, and that I am in His presence! You need not tell me there is no hell. I feel myself already slipping. Wretches, cease your idle talk about there being hope for me! I know I am lost forever! Oh, that fire! Oh, the sufferable pangs of hell!"
• M.F. Rich: "Terrible horrors hang over my soul! I have given my immortality for gold; and its weight sinks me into a hopeless, helpless Hell!"
• Thomas Paine, the leading atheistic writer in the American colonies: "I would give worlds if I had them, that the Age of Reason had never been published. O Lord, help me! Chrsit, help me!... No, don't leave; stay with me! Send even a child to stay with me; for I am on the edge of Hell here alone. If ever the Devil had an agent, I have been one."
• Napoleon Bonaparte, the French emperor who brought death to millions, to satisfy his selfish plans: " I die before my time, and my body will be given back to the earth. Such is the faite of him who has been called the great Napoleon. What an abyss between my deep misery and the eternal kingdom of Christ!"
• Aldamont, the infidel: "My principles have poisoned my friend; my extravagance has beggared my boy; my unkindness has murdered my wife. And is there another hell yet ahead?"
• John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Abraham Lincoln: "Useless! Useless! The terrors before me!"
• Thomas Carlyle: " I am as good as without hope, a sad old man gazing into the final chasm."
• David Strauss, leading representative of German rationalism, after spending a lifetime erasing belief in God from the minds of others: "My philosophy leaves me utterly forlorn! I feel like one caught in the merciless jaws of an automatic machine, not knowing at what time one of its great hammers may crush me!"
• Tallyrand, one of the most cunning French political leaders of the Napoleonic era. On a paper found at his death were these words: "Behold eighty-three passed away! What cares! What agitation! What anxieties! What ill will! What sad complications! And all without other results except great fatigue of mind and body, a profound sentiment of discouragement with regard to the future and disgust with regard to the past!"

Some 15 years before his death Mhatma Gandhi wrote: "I must tell you in all humility that Hinduism, as I know it, entirely satisfies my soul, fills my whole being, and I find a solace in the Bhagavad and Upanishads."

Just before his death, Gandhi wrote: "My days are numbered. I am not likely to live very long-- perhaps a year or a little more. For the first time in fifty years I fond myself in the slough of despond. All about me is darkness; I am praying for light."

"What did you do to our daughter?" asked a Moslem woman, whose child died at 16 years of age. "We did nothing," answered the missionary. "Oh, yes, you did," persisted the mother. "She died smiling. Our people do not die like that." The girl had found Christ and believed on Him a few months before. Fear of death had gone. Hope and joy had taken its place.

In a Newsweek interview with Sveltlana Stalin, the daughter of Josef Stalin, she told of her father's death: "My father died a difficult and terrible death...God grants an easy death only to the just...At what seemed the very last moment he suddenly opened his eyes and cast a glance over everyone in the room. It was a terrible glance, insane or perhaps angry... His left hand was raised, as though he were pointing to something above and bringing down a curse on us all. The gesture was full of menace...The next moment he was dead."

Charles IX was the French king who, urged on by his mother, gave the order for the massacre of the Huguenots, in which 15,000 souls were slaughtered in Paris alone and 100,000 in other sections of France, for no other reason than that they loved Christ. The guilty king suffered miserably for years after that event. He finally died, bathed in blood bursting from his veins. to his physicians he said in his last hours: "Asleep or awake, I see the mangled forms of the Huguenots passing before me. They drop with blood. They point at their open wounds. Oh, that I had spared at least the little infants at the breast! What blood! I know not where I am. How will all this end? What shall I do? I am lost forever! I know it. Oh, I have done wrong."

William E. Henley, an atheist, wrote a famous poem; the lst two lines have often been quoted:
"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be.
"Beyond this place of wrath and tears
"Looms but the horror of the shade;
"And yet the menace of the years
"Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
"It matters not how strait the gate,
"How charged with punishment the scroll,
"I am the master of my fate'
"I am the captain of my soul."

Men who have been bold in their defiance of God have lauded Henley's poem, but most of them were not aware that William Henley later committed suicide.