“MY brethren, there is no teacher, no preacher, no doctor, no apostle, so eloquent, so mighty, so convincing as death. What should we say of a man who had the gift, by a breath, or a word of his mouth, of driving away the mental delusions and follies of all the maniacs and lunatics in the world, or of giving sight to all the blind, or of flooding with knowledge and learning the minds of all the ignorant? Certainly we should say that he had a great gift. But the gift of death is greater.

… [M]any or great, blameable or innocent, fatal or excusable, of whatever kind or of whatever degree, all delusions will go then. The sinner who has so clung to the inventions of his passions or his interest that he has persuaded himself to live a bad life in the midst of the greatest light and the highest privileges, will doubt no more then.”

— Henry James Coleridge, The Return of the King: Discourses on the Latter Days, 1894

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