NO PAIN AT THE LAST MOMENT

Generally there is no pain at the last moment, for it seems that the body suffers in proportion to its remoteness from death. It is commonly supposed that evil men die in great horror of their doom. They don't. Wicked men usually pass out of life as tranquilly as anyone else. Tranquillity is the law of decadence. Pain or exquisite pleasure at the last are only experienced in exceptional cases. Men suffer more every day of their lives than they do in dying. Every man subject to the incursions of rheumatic affections, or to the pangs of toothache, suffers a hundred times more than he will when he is on his death bed. No death is more painless than sudden death. Livingstone records his experience when sprung upon and struck down by a lion. The moment when the beast was on him was one of the most exquisite tranquility. No death is too sudden for him who is doing his duty. Not the stroke of the lighting; not the fall from the precipice. Right living is the correct road to right dying, and no man need fear death.

Henry Ward Beecher 

(The Encyclopaedia of Death and Life in the Spirit World—Opinions and Experiences from Eminent Sources, J. R. Francis, Chicago, The Progressive Thinker Publishing House, 1903)