““For, in those centuries, when numbers of children died in the cradle and half the women in childbirth, when epidemics ravaged adult life, when wounds were but rarely cured, and sores did not heal, when the Church’s teaching was ceaselessly directed towards a consciousness of sin, when the statues in the sanctuaries showed worms gnawing at corpses, when each one carried throughout his life the spectre of his own decomposition before his eyes and the idea of death was habitual, natural and familiar, to be present at a man’s last breath was not, as it is for us, a tragic reminder of our common destiny.””
