"Every cradle asks us `Whence?' and every coffin `Whither?' The poor barbarian, weeping above his dead, can answer these questions just as well as the robed priest of the most authentic creed. The tearful ignorance of the one, is as consoling as the learned and unmeaning words of the other. No man standing at the horizon of a life that has touched a grave, has any right to prophesy a future filled with pain and tears.

"May be that death gives all there is of worth to life. If those we press and strain within our arms could never die, perhaps that love would wither from the earth. May be this common fate treads from out the paths between our hearts the weeds of selfishness and hate...

"They who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst, is only perfect rest...We, too, have our religion, and it is this: Help for the living--Hope for the dead."

These words are, it seems to me, as appropriate for a senseless mass shooting as for the deaths of small children, which occurred much more frequently in Ingersoll's century than in our own.