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Show NO FEAli, OF DEATH ECCENTRIC AGNOSTIC DIES AS HE HAD LIVED. Remarkable Document Prepared By Himself, Read at the Funeral of A. D. Searl of Leadvllle, Colo.- Some Beautiful Thoughts. The funeral of the late A. D. Searl, the eccentric agnostic who has gained gain-ed considerable notoriety hereabouts, here-abouts, took place on Wednesday under the auspices of the local Grand Army post, says a correspondent at Leadville, Colo. Mr. Searl, who was one of the pioneers of the Leadville district, made a special request that no religious exercises be held at his funeral, but he himself prepared and had read a remarkable address touching touch-ing on his own peculiar religious belief. be-lief. In it he said: "I have long been convinced that all religions are of human origin and frauds that only gain credence through ignorance and superstition. I may say that a flute is an instrument of material organization. organiza-tion. Its capacity for music or its tone is its soul, and though its tone and its capacity for music ceases when the material flute is destroyed, still the effect of that music, which it discoursed while the instrument was in existence, still goes on creating, creat-ing, forming and molding thoughts, feelings and actions in those who have heard it. And so on forever every act of our lives, every word we speak, every thought we think has its unending influence in the endless chain of cause and effect that binds and governs the universe." Among other thoughts contained in Mr. Searl's address were these kindly utterances: "So the great sea of human thought and emotion has been moved by our acts, thought or words and can never again be exactly what it would have been without our influence that we exert in the world in the effect that we produce in persons and things about us, and thus the great mass of humanity will be happy or miserable in the future, according as our thoughts and deeds have been good or bad. "Friends and loved ones pass away, but they leave their spirits with us in the memory of what they were and in the influence they have shed around them. The little child that has not learned to lisp its mother's name dies in its budding babyhood, but leaves behind in the mother's heart a sacred memory that will shape her destin;- and purify her character. char-acter. Nature has imbued in all organized or-ganized beings a love of life. Were it otherwise we woulu make no struggle strug-gle to preserve it, and out of this love of life and instinct for its preservation preserva-tion has grown the hope of 'immortality. 'immortal-ity. "I leave the world with kindness toward all men and at peace with my own mind. There is no fear of any angry God nor hope nor desire for any gift from his hand. To all those who have loved and cherished me I would say that their numberless acts of kindness have been appreciated with my dying breath. My heart overflows with gratitude for it all, and I now bid you a last farewell." |