Less than a decade after Emma Darwin wrote to her husband about her fears for eternity Charlotte Bronte put an alternative solution into the mouth of 10 year old Jane Eyre when she was interrogated by Mr Brocklehurst about how she proposed to avoid going to Hell:
I must keep in good health & not die
A determination which seems to have been adopted on our behalf by the NHS & the politicians who set targets for it
Sometimes it is hard not to conclude that these people believe that, rather than just its wages, death itself has become the Sin & Life its penance (to be measured out in numbers)
