[A]ἄγγελος.
[A]ἄγγελος.
She lay back in the grass, with her face up-turned to the sky, and drew a long breath, wearily. I do not think she meant me to hear it. I did not answer her, for it came over me with such a hopeless thrill, how good it would be to be taken to Roy, there by his beautiful grave, with the ivy and the May-flowers and the sunlight and the clover-leaves round about; and that it could not be, and how long it was to wait,—it came over me so that I could not speak.
“There!” she said, suddenly rousing, “what a thoughtless, wicked thing it was to say!And I meant to give you only the good cheer of a cheery friend. No, I do not care to go this afternoon, nor any afternoon, till my Father is ready for me. Wherever he has most for me to do, there I wish,—yes, I think Iwishto stay. He knows best.”
After a pause, I asked again, “Why did He not tell us more about this thing,—about their presence with us? You see if I couldknowit!”
“The mystery of the Bible lies not so much in what it says, as in what it does not say,” she replied. “But I suppose that we have been told all that we can comprehend in this world. Knowledge on one point might involve knowledge on another, like the links of a chain, till it stretched far beyond our capacity. At any rate, it is not for me to break the silence. That is God’s affair. I can only accept the fact. Nevertheless, as Dr. Chalmers says: ‘It were well for us all could we carefully draw the line between the secret things which belong to God and the things which are revealed and belong to us and to our children.’ Some one else,—Whately, I think,—I remember to have noticed as speaking about these very subjects to this effect,—that precisely because weknow so little of them, it is the more important that we ‘should endeavor so to dwell on them as to make the most of what little knowledge we have.’”
“Aunt Winifred, you are such a comfort!”
“It needs our best faith,” she said, “to bear this reticence of God. I cannot help thinking sometimes of a thing Lauderdale said,—I am always quoting him,—from ‘Son of the Soil,’ you remember: ‘It’s an awfu’ marvel, beyond my reach, when a word of communication would make a’ the difference, why it’s no permitted, if it were but to keep a heart from breaking now and then.’ Think of poor Eugénie de Guèrin, trying to continue her little journal ‘To Maurice in Heaven,’ till the awful, answerless stillness shut up the book and laid aside the pen.
“But then,” she continued, “there is this to remember,—I may have borrowed the idea, or it may be my own,—that if we could speak to them, or they to us, there would be no death, for there would be no separation. The last, the surest, in some cases the only test of loyalty to God, would thus be taken away. Roman Catholic nature is human nature, when it comes upon its kneesbefore a saint. Many lives—all such lives as yours and mine—would become—”
“Would become what?”
“One long defiance to the First Commandment.”
I cannot become used to such words from such quiet lips. Yet they give me a curious sense of the trustworthiness of her peace. “Founded upon a rock,” it seems to be. She has done what it takes a lifetime for some of us to do; what some of us go into eternity, leaving undone; what I am afraid I shall never do,—sounded her own nature. She knows the worst of herself, and faces it as fairly, I believe, as anybody can do in this world. As for the best of herself, she trusts that to Christ, and he knows it, and we. I hope she, in her sweet humbleness, will know it some day.
“I suppose, nevertheless,” she said, “that Roy knows what you are doing and feeling as well as, perhaps better than, he knew it three months ago. So he can help you without harming you.”
I asked her, turning suddenly, how that could be, and yet heaven be heaven,—how he could see me suffer what I had suffered, could see me sometimes when I supposed none butGod had seen me,—and sing on and be happy.
“You are not the first, Mary, and you will not be the last, to ask that question. I cannot answer it, and I never heard of any who could. I feel sure only of this,—that he would suffer far less to see you than to know nothing about you; and that God’s power of inventing happiness is not to be blocked by an obstacle like this. Perhaps Roy sees the end from the beginning, and can bear the sight of pain for the peace that he watches coming to meet you. I do not know,—that does not perplex me now; it only makes me anxious for one thing.”
“What is that?”
“That you and I shall not do anything to make them sorry.”
“To make them sorry?”
“Roy would care. Roy would be disappointed to see you make life a hopeless thing for his sake, or to see you doubt his Saviour.”
“Do you thinkthat?”
“Some sort of mourning over sin enters that happy life. God himself ‘was grieved’ forty years long over his wandering people. Among the angels there has been ‘silence,’ whatever that mysterious pause may mean, just as there is joy over one sinner that repenteth; another of my proof-texts that, to show that they are allowed to keep us in sight.”
“Then you think, you really think, that Roy remembers and loves and takes care of me; that he has been listening, perhaps, and is—why, you don’t think he may behere?”
“Yes, I do. Here, close beside you all this time, trying to speak to you through the blessed sunshine and the flowers, trying to help you, and sure to love you,—right here, dear. I do not believe God means to send him away from you, either.”
My heart was too full to answer her. Seeing how it was, she slipped away, and, strolling out of sight with her face to the eastern hills, left me alone.
And yet I did not seem alone. The low branches swept with a little soft sigh across the grave; the May-flowers wrapped me in with fragrance thick as incense; the tiny sparrow turned her soft eyes at me over the edge of the nest, and chirped contentedly; the “blessed sunshine” talked with me as it touched the edges of the ivy-leaves to fire.
I cannot write it even here, how these things stole into my heart and hushed me. If I had seen him standing by the stainless cross, it would not have frightened or surprised me. There—not dead or gone, butthere—it helps me, and makes me strong!
“Mamie! little Mamie!”
O Roy, I will try to bear it all, if you will only stay!
May 20.
The nearer the time has come for Aunt Winifred to go, the more it has seemed impossible to part with her. I have run away from the thought like a craven, till she made me face it this morning, by saying decidedly that she should go on the first of the week.
I dropped my sewing; the work-basket tipped over, and all my spools rolled away under the chairs. I had a little time to think while I was picking them up.
“There is the rest of my visit at Norwich to be made, you know,” she said, “and while I am there I shall form some definite plans for the summer; I have hardly decided what, yet. I had better leave here by the seven o’clock train, if such an early start will not incommode you.”
I wound up the last spool, and turned away to the window. There was a confused, dreary sky of scurrying clouds, and a cold wind wasbruising the apple-buds. I hate a cold wind in May. It made me choke a little, thinking how I should sit and listen to it after she was gone,—of the old, blank, comfortless days that must come and go,—of what she had brought, and what she would take away. I was a bit faint, I think, for a minute. I had not really thought the prospect through, before.
“Mary,” she said, “what’s the matter? Come here.”
I went over, and she drew me into her lap, and I put my arms about her neck.
“I cannotbear it,” said I, “and that is the matter.”
She smiled, but her smile faded when she looked at me.
And then I told her, sobbing, how it was; that I could not go into my future alone,—I could not do it! that she did not know how weak I was,—and reckless,—and wicked; that she did not know what she had been to me. I begged her not to leave me. I begged her to stay and help me bear my life.
“My dear! you are as bad as Faith when I put her to bed alone.”
“But,” I said, “when Faith cries, you go to her, you know.”
“Are you quite in earnest, Mary?” she asked, after a pause. “You don’t know very much about me, after all, and there is the child. It is always an experiment, bringing two families into lifelong relations under one roof. If I could think it best, you might repent your bargain.”
“Iam not ‘a family,’”I said, feebly trying to laugh. “Aunt Winifred, if you and Faith onlywillmake this your home, I can never thank you, never. I shall be entertaining my good angels, and that is the whole of it.”
“I have had some thought of not going back,” she said at last, in a low, constrained voice, as if she were touching something that gave her great pain, “for Faith’s sake. I should like to educate her in New England, if—I had intended if we stayed to rent or buy a little home of our own somewhere, but I had been putting off a decision. We are most weak and most selfish sometimes when we think ourselves strongest and noblest, Mary. I love my husband’s people. I think they love me. I was almost happy with them. It seemed as if I were carrying on his work for him. That was so pleasant!”
She put me down out of her arms and walked across the room.
“I will think the matter over,” she said, by and by, in her natural tones, “and let you know to-night.”
She went away up stairs then, and I did not see her again until to-night. I sent Faith up with her dinner and tea, judging that she would rather see the child than me. I observed, when the dishes came down, that she had touched nothing but a cup of coffee.
I began to understand, as I sat alone in the parlor through the afternoon, how much I had asked of her. In my selfish distress at losing her, I had not thought of that. Faces that her husband loved, meadows and hills and sunsets that he has watched, the home where his last step sounded and his last word was spoken, the grave where she has laid him,—this last more than all,—call after her, and cling to her with yearning closeness. To leave them, is to leave the last faint shadow of her beautiful past. It hurts, but she is too brave to cry out.
Tea was over, and Faith in bed, but still she did not come down. I was sitting by the window, watching a little crescent moon climb over the hills, and wondering whether I had better go up, when she came in and stood behind me, and said, attempting to laugh:—
“Very impolite in me to run off so, wasn’t it? Cowardly, too, I think. Well, Mary?”
“Well, Auntie?”
“Have you not repented your proposition yet?”
“You would excel as an inquisitor, Mrs. Forceythe!”
“Then it shall be as you say; as long as you want us you shall have us,—Faith and me.”
I turned to thank her, but could not when I saw her face. It was very pale; there was something inexpressibly sad about her mouth, and her eyelids drooped heavily, like one weary from a great struggle.
Feeling for the moment guilty and ashamed before her, as if I had done her wrong, “It is going to be very hard for you,” I said.
“Never mind about that,” she answered, quickly. “We will not talk about that. I knew, though I did notwishto know, that it was best for Faith. Your hands about my neck have settled it. Where the work is, there the laborer must be. It is quite plain now. I have been talking it over with them all the afternoon; it seems to be what they want.”
“Withthem”? I started at the words; whohad been in her lonely chamber? Ah, it is simply real to her. Who, indeed, but her Saviour and her husband?
She did not seem inclined to talk, and stole away from me presently, and out of doors; she was wrapped in her blanket shawl, and had thrown a shimmering white hood over her gray hair. I wondered where she could be going, and sat still at the window watching her. She opened and shut the gate softly; and, turning her face towards the churchyard, walked up the street and out of my sight.
She feels nearer to him in the resting-place of the dead. Her heart cries after the grave by which she will never sit and weep again; on which she will never plant the roses any more.
As I sat watching and thinking this, the faint light struck her slight figure and little shimmering hood again, and she walked down the street and in with steady step.
When she came up and stood beside me, smiling, with the light knitted thing thrown back on her shoulders, her face seemed to rise from it as from a snowy cloud; and for her look,—I wish Raphael could have had it for one of his rapt Madonnas.
“Now, Mary,” she said, with the sparkle back again in her voice, “I am ready to be entertaining, and promise not to play the hermit again very soon. Shall I sit here on the sofa with you? Yes, my dear, I am happy, quite happy.”
So then we took this new promise of home that has come to make my life, if not joyful, something less than desolate, and analyzed it in its practical bearings. What a pity that all pretty dreams have to be analyzed! I had some notion about throwing our little incomes into a joint family fund, but she put a veto to that; I suppose because mine is the larger. She prefers to take board for herself and Faith; but, if I know myself, she shall never be suffered to have the feeling of a boarder, and I will make her so much at home in my house that she shall not remember that it is not her own.
Her visit to Norwich she has decided to put off until the autumn, so that I shall have her to myself undisturbed all summer.
I have been looking at Roy’s picture a long time, and wondering how he would like the new plan. I said something of the sort to her.
“Why put any ‘would’ in that sentence?” she said, smiling. “It belongs in the present tense.”
“Then I am sure he likes it,” I answered,—“he likes it,” and I said the words over till I was ready to cry for rest in their sweet sound.
22d.
It is Roy’s birthday. But I have not spoken of it. We used to make a great deal of these little festivals,—but it is of no use to write about that.
I am afraid I have been bearing it very badly all day. She noticed my face, but said nothing till to-night. Mrs. Bland was down stairs, and I had come away alone up here in the dark. I heard her asking for me, but would not go down. By and by Aunt Winifred knocked, and I let her in.
“Mrs. Bland cannot understand why you don’t see her, Mary,” she said, gently. “You know you have not thanked her for those English violets that she sent the other day. I only thought I would remind you; she might feel a little pained.”
“I can’t to-night,—not to-night, Aunt Winifred. You must excuse me to her somehow. I don’t want to go down.”
“Is it that you don’t ‘want to,’ orisit that you can’t?” she said, in that gentle, motherly way of hers, at which I can never take offence. “Mary, I wonder if Roy would not a little rather that you would go down?”
It might have been Roy himself who spoke.
I went down.
June 1.
Aunt Winifred went to the office this morning, and met Dr. Bland, who walked home with her. He always likes to talk with her.
A woman who knows something about fate, free-will, and foreknowledge absolute, who is not ignorant of politics, and talks intelligently of Agassiz’s latest fossil, who can understand a German quotation, and has heard of Strauss and Neander, who can dash her sprightliness ably against his old dry bones of metaphysics and theology, yet never speak an accent above that essentially womanly voice of hers, is, I imagine, a phenomenon in his social experience.
I was sitting at the window when they came up and stopped at the gate. Dr. Bland lifted his hat to me in his grave way, talking the while; somewhat eagerly, too, I could see. Aunt Winifred answered him with a peculiar smile and a few low words that I could not hear.
“But, my dear madam,” he said, “the gloryof God, you see, the glory of God is the primary consideration.”
“But the glory of Godinvolvesthese lesser glories, as a sidereal system, though a splendid whole, exists by the multiplied differing of one star from another star. Ah, Dr. Bland, you make a grand abstraction out of it, but it makes me cold,”—she shivered, half playfully, half involuntarily,—“it makes me cold. I am very much alive and human; and Christ was human God.”
She came in smiling a little sadly, and stood by me, watching the minister walk over the hill.
“How much does that man love his wife and children?” she asked abruptly.
“A good deal. Why?”
“I am afraid that he will lose one of them then, before many more years of his life are past.”
“What! he hasn’t been telling you that they are consumptive or anything of the sort?”
“O dear me, no,” with a merry laugh which died quickly away: “I was only thinking,—there is trouble in store for him; some intense pain,—if he is capable of intense pain,—which shall shake his cold, smooth theorizing to the foundation. He speaks a foreign tongue when he talks of bereavement, of death, of the future life. No argument could convince him of that, though, which is the worst of it.”
“He must think you shockingly heterodox.”
“I don’t doubt it. We had a little talk this morning, and he regarded me with an expression of mingled consternation and perplexity that was curious. He is a very good man. He is not a stupid man. I only wish that he would stop preaching and teaching things that he knows nothing about.
“He is only drifting with the tide, though,” she added, “in his views of this matter. In our recoil from the materialism of the Romish Church, we have, it seems to me, nearly stranded ourselves on the opposite shore. Just as, in a rebound from the spirit which would put our Saviour on a level with Buddha or Mahomet, we have been in danger of forgetting ‘to begin as the Bible begins,’ with his humanity. It is the grandeur of inspiration, that it knows how tobalancetruth.”
It had been in my mind for several days to ask Aunt Winifred something, and, feeling inthe mood, I made her take off her things and devote herself to me. My question concerned what we call the “intermediate state.”
“I have been expecting that,” she said; “what about it?”
“Whatisit?”
“Life and activity.”
“We do not go to sleep, of course.”
“I believe that notion is about exploded, though clear thinkers like Whately have appeared to advocate it. Where it originated, I do not know, unless from the frequent comparisons in the Scriptures of death with sleep, which refer solely, I am convinced, to the condition of body, and which are voted down by an overwhelming majority of decided statements relative to the consciousness, happiness, and tangibility of the life into which we immediately pass.”
“It is intermediate, in some sense, I suppose.”
“It waits between two other conditions,—yes; I think the drift of what we are taught about it leads to that conclusion. I expect to become at once sinless, but to have a broader Christian character many years hence; to be happy at once, but to be happier by and by;to find in myself wonderful new tastes and capacities, which are to be immeasurably ennobled and enlarged after the Resurrection, whatever that may mean.”
“What does it mean?”
“I know no more than you, but you shall hear what I think, presently. I was going to say that this seems to be plain enough in the Bible. The angels took Lazarus at once to Abraham. Dives seems to have found no interval between death and consciousness of suffering.”
“They always tell you that that is only a parable.”
“But it must meansomething. No story in the Bible has been pulled to pieces and twisted about as that has been. We are in danger of pulling and twisting all sense out of it. Then Judas, having hanged his wretched self, went to his own place. Besides, there was Christ’s promise to the thief.”
I told her that I had heard Dr. Bland say that we could not place much dependence on that passage, because “Paradise” did not necessarily mean heaven.
“But it meant living, thinking, enjoying; for ‘To-day thou shaltbe with me.’ Paul’s beautifulperplexed revery, however, would be enough if it stood alone; for he did not know whether he would rather stay in this world, or depart and be with Christ, which is far better.With Christ, you see; and His three mysterious days, which typify our intermediate state, were over then, and he had ascended to his Father. Would it be ‘far better’ either to leave this actual tangible life throbbing with hopes and passions, to leave its busy, Christ-like working, its quiet joys, its very sorrows which are near and human, for a nap of several ages, or even for a vague, lazy, half-alive, disembodied existence?”
“Disembodied? I supposed, of course, that it was disembodied.”
“I do not think so. And that brings us to the Resurrection. All thetendencyof Revelation is to show that an embodied state is superior to a disembodied one. Yet certainly we who love God are promised that death will lead us into a condition which shall have the advantage of this: for the good apostle to die ‘was gain.’ I don’t believe, for instance, that Adam and Eve have been wandering about in a misty condition all these thousands of years. I suspect that we have some sort of bodyimmediately after passing out of this, but that there is to come a mysterious change, equivalent, perhaps, to a re-embodiment, when our capacities for action will be greatly improved, and that in some manner this new form will be connected with this ‘garment by the soul laid by.’”
“Deacon Quirk expects to rise in his own entire, original body, after it has lain in the First Church cemetery a proper number of years, under a black slate headstone, adorned by a willow, and such a ‘cherubim’ as that poor boy shot,—by the way, if I’ve laughed at that story once, I have fifty times.”
“Perhaps Deacon Quirk would admire a work of art that I found stowed away on the top of your Uncle Calvin’s bookcases. It was an old woodcut—nobody knows how old—of an interesting skeleton rising from his grave, and, in a sprightly and modest manner, drawing on his skin, while Gabriel, with apoplectic cheeks, feet uppermost in the air, was blowing a good-sized tin trumpet in his ear!
“No; some of the popular notions of resurrection are simple physiological impossibilities, from causes ‘too tedious to specify.’ Imagine, for instance, the resurrection of two Hottentots, one of whom has happened to make adinner of the other some fine day. A little complication there! Or picture the touching scene, when that devoted husband, King Mausolas, whose widow had him burned and ate the ashes, should feel moved to institute a search for his body! It is no wonder that the infidel argument has the best of it, when we attempt to enforce a natural impossibility. It is worth while to remember that Paul expressly stated that we shallnotrise in our entire earthly bodies. The simile which he used is the seed sown, dying in, and mingling with, the ground. How many of its original particles are found in the full-grown corn?”
“Yet you believe thatsomethingbelonging to this body is preserved for the completion of another?”
“Certainly. I accept God’s statement about it, which is as plain as words can make a statement. I do not know, and I do not care to know, how it is to be effected. God will not be at a loss for a way, any more than he is at a loss for a way to make his fields blossom every spring. For aught we know, some invisible compound of an annihilated body may hover, by a divine decree, around the site of death till it is wanted,—sufficient to preserve identityas strictly as a body can ever be said to preserve it; and stranger things have happened. You remember the old Mohammedan belief in the one little bone which is imperishable. Prof. Bush’s idea of our triune existence is suggestive, for a notion. He believed, you know, that it takes a material body, a spiritual body, and a soul, to make a man. The spiritual body is enclosed within the material, the soul within the spiritual. Death is simply the slipping off of the outer body, as a husk slips off from its kernel. The deathless frame stands ready then for the soul’s untrammelled occupation. But it is a waste of time to speculate over such useless fancies, while so many remain that will vitally affect our happiness.”
It is singular; but I never gave a serious thought—and I have done some thinking about other matters—to my heavenly body, till that moment, while I sat listening to her. In fact, till Roy went, the Future was a miserable, mysterious blank, to be drawn on and on in eternal and joyless monotony, and to which, at times, annihilation seemed preferable. I remember, when I was a child, asking father once, if I were so good that Ihadto go to heaven, whether, after a hundred years, Godwould not let me “die out.” More or less of the disposition of that same desperate little sinner I suspect has always clung to me. So I asked Aunt Winifred, in some perplexity, what she supposed our bodies would be like.
“It must be nearly all ‘suppose,’”she said, “for we are nowhere definitely told. But this is certain. They will be as real as these.”
“But these you can see, you can touch.”
“What would be the use of having a body that you can’t see and touch? A body is abody, not a spirit. Why should you not, having seen Roy’s old smile and heard his own voice, clasp his hand again, and feel his kiss on your happy lips?
“It is really amusing,” she continued, “to sum up the notions that good people—excellent people—even thinking people—have of the heavenly body. Vague visions of floating about in the clouds, of balancing—with a white robe on, perhaps—in stiff rows about a throne, like the angels in the old pictures, converging to an apex, or ranged in semi-circles like so many marbles. Murillo has one charming exception. I always take a secret delight in that little cherub of his, kicking the clouds, in the right-hand upper corner ofthe Immaculate Conception; he seems to be having a good time of it, in genuine baby-fashion. The truth is, that the ordinary idea, if sifted accurately, reduces our eternal personality to—gas.
“Isaac Taylor holds, that, as far as the abstract idea of spirit is concerned, it may just as reasonably be granite as ether.
“Mrs. Charles says a pretty thing about this. She thinks these ‘super-spiritualized angels’ very ‘unsatisfactory’ beings, and that ‘the heart returns with loving obstinacy to the young men in long white garments’ who sat waiting in the sepulchre.
“Here again I cling to my conjecture about the word ‘angel’; for then we should learn emphatically something about our future selves.
“‘As the angels in heaven,’ or ‘equal unto the angels,’ we are told in another place,—that may mean simply what it says. At least, if we are to resemble them in the particular respect of which the words were spoken,—and that one of the most important which could well be selected,—it is not unreasonable to infer that we shall resemble them in others. ‘In the Resurrection,’ by the way, means, in that connection and in many others, simplyfuture state of existence, without any reference to the time at which the great bodily change is to come.
“‘But this is a digression,’ as the novelists say. I was going to say, that it bewilders me to conjecture where students of the Bible have discovered the usual foggy nonsense about the corporeity of heaven.
“If there is anything laid down in plain statement, devoid of metaphor or parable, simple and unequivocal, it is the definite contradiction of all that. Paul, in his preface to that sublime apostrophe to death, repeats and reiterates it, lest we should make a mistake in his meaning.
“‘There are celestialbodies.’ ‘It is raised a spiritualbody.’ ‘There is a spiritualbody.’ ‘Itisraised in incorruption.’ ‘Itisraised in glory.’ ‘Itisraised in power.’ Moses, too, when he came to the transfigured mount in glory, had as real abodyas when he went into the lonely mount to die.”
“But they will be different from these?”
“The glory of the terrestrial is one, the glory of the celestial another. Take away sin and sickness and misery, and that of itself would make difference enough.”
“You do not suppose that we shall look as we look now?”
“I certainly do. At least, I think it more than possible that the ‘human form divine,’ or something like it, is to be retained. Not only from the fact that risen Elijah bore it; and Moses, who, if he had not passed through his resurrection, does not seem to have looked different from the other,—I have to use those two poor prophets on all occasions, but, as we are told of them neither by parable nor picture, they are important,—and that angels never appeared in any other, but because, in sinless Eden, God chose it for Adam and Eve. What came in unmarred beauty direct from His hand cannot be unworthy of His other Paradise ‘beyond the stars.’ It would chime in pleasantly, too, with the idea of Redemption, that our very bodies, free from all the distortion of guilt, shall return to something akin to the pure ideal in which He moulded them. Then there is another reason, and stronger.”
“What is that?”
“The human form has been borne and dignified forever by Christ. And, further than that, He ascended to His Father in it, and lives there in it as human God to-day.”
I had never thought of that, and said so.
“Yes, with the very feet which trod the dusty road to Emmaus; the very wounded hands which Thomas touched, believing; the very lips which ate of the broiled fish and honeycomb; the very voice which murmured ‘Mary!’ in the garden, and which told her that He ascended unto His Father and her Father, to His God and her God, He ‘was parted from them,’ and was ‘received up into heaven.’ His death and resurrection stand forever the great prototype of ours. Otherwise, what is the meaning of such statements as these: ‘When He shall appear, we shall belike Him’; ‘The first man (Adam) is of the earth; the second man is the Lord. As we have borne the image of the earthy,we shall also bear the image of the heavenly’? And what of this, when we are told that our ‘vile bodies,’ being changed, shall be fashioned ‘like unto His glorious body’?”
I asked her if she inferred from that, that we should have just such bodies as the freedom from pain and sin would make of these.
“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom,” she said. “There is no escaping that, even if I had the smallest desire to escapeit, which I have not. Whatever is essentially earthly and temporary in the arrangements of this world will be out of place and unnecessary there. Earthly and temporary, flesh and blood certainly are.”
“Christ said, ‘A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.’”
“Aspirithath not; and who ever said that it did? His body had something that appeared like them, certainly. That passage, by the way, has led some ingenious writer on the Chemistry of Heaven to infer that our bodies there will be like these, minusblood! I don’t propose to spend my time over such investigations. Summing up the meaning of the story of those last days before the Ascension, and granting the shade of mystery which hangs over them, I gather this,—that the spiritual body is real, is tangible, is visible, is human, but that ‘we shall be changed.’ Some indefinable but thorough change had come over Him. He could withdraw Himself from the recognition of Mary, and from the disciples, whose ‘eyes were holden,’ as it pleased Him. He came and went through barred and bolted doors. He appeared suddenly in a certain place, without sound of footstep or flutterof garment to announce His approach. He vanished, and was not, like a cloud. New and wonderful powers had been given to Him, of which, probably, His little bewildered group of friends saw but a few illustrations.”
“And He was yetman?”
“He was Jesus of Nazareth until the sorrowful drama of human life that He had taken upon Himself was thoroughly finished, from manger to sepulchre, and from sepulchre to the right hand of His Father.”
“I like to wonder,” she said, presently, “what we are going to look like and be like.Ourselves, in the first place. ‘It is I Myself,’ Christ said. Then to be perfectly well, never a sense of pain or weakness,—imagine how much solid comfort, if one had no other, in being forever rid of all the ills that flesh is heir to! Beautiful, too, I suppose we shall be, every one. Have you never had that come over you, with a thrill of compassionate thankfulness, when you have seen a poor girl shrinking, as only girls can shrink, under the life-long affliction of a marred face or form? The loss or presence of beauty is not as slight a deprivation or blessing as the moralists would make it out. Your grandmother, who was the mostbeautiful woman I ever saw, the belle of the county all her young days, and the model for artists’ fancy sketching even in her old ones, as modest as a violet and as honest as the sunshine, used to have the prettiest little way when we girls were in our teens, and she thought that we must be lectured a bit on youthful vanity, of adding, in her quiet voice, smoothing down her black silk apron as she spoke, ‘But still it is a thing to be thankful for, my dear, to have acomely countenance.’
“But to return to the track and our future bodies. We shall find them vastly convenient, undoubtedly, with powers of which there is no dreaming. Perhaps they will be so one with the soul that to will will be to do,—hindrance out of the question. I, for instance, sitting here by you, and thinking that I should like to be in Kansas, would be there. There is an interesting bit of a hint in Daniel about Gabriel, who, ‘being caused to fly swiftly, touched him about the time of the evening oblation.’”
“But do you not make a very material kind of heaven out of such suppositions?”
“It depends upon what you mean by ‘material.’ The term does not, to my thinking, implydegradation, except so far as it is associated with sin. Dr. Chalmers has the right of it, when he talks about ‘spiritual materialism.’ He says in his sermon on the New Heavens and Earth,—which, by the way, you should read, and from which I wish a few more of our preachers would learn something,—that we ‘forget that on the birth of materialism, when it stood out in the freshness of those glories which the great Architect of Nature had impressed upon it, that then the “morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”’I do not believe in agrossheaven, but I believe in areasonableone.”
4th.
We have been devoting ourselves to feminine vanities all day out in the orchard. Aunt Winifred has been making her summer bonnet, and I some linen collars. I saw, though she said nothing, that she thought thecrêpea little gloomy, and I am going to wear these in the mornings to please her.
She has an accumulation of work on hand, and in the afternoon I offered to tuck a little dress for Faith,—the prettiest pinkbarègeaffair pale as a blush rose, and about as delicate.Faith, who had been making mud-pies in the swamp, and was spattered with black peat from curls to stockings, looked on approvingly, and wanted it to wear on a flag-root expedition to-morrow. It seemed to do me good to do something for somebody after all this lonely and—I suspect—selfish idleness.
6th.
I read a little of Dr. Chalmers to-day, and went laughing to Aunt Winifred with the first sentence.
“There is a limit to the revelations of the Bible about futurity, and it were a mental or spiritual trespass to go beyond it.”
“Ah! but,” she said, “look a little farther down.”
And I read, “But while we attempt not to be ‘wise above that which is written,’ we should attempt, and that most studiously, to be wiseupto that which is written.”
8th.
It occurred to me to-day, that it was a noticeable fact, that, among all the visits of angels to this world of which we are told, no one seems to have discovered in any the presence of adead friend. If redeemed men are subject to the same laws as they, why did such a thing never happen? I asked Aunt Winifred, and she said that the question reminded her of St. Augustine’s lonely cry thirty years after the death of Monica: “Ah, the dead do not come back; for, had it been possible, there has not been a night when I should not have seen my mother!” There seemed to be two reasons, she said, why there should be no exceptions to the law of silence imposed between us and those who have left us; one of which was, that we should be overpowered with familiar curiosity about them, which nobody seems to have dared to express in the presence of angels, and the secrets of their life God has decreed that it is unlawful to utter.
“But Lazarus, and Jairus’s little daughter, and the dead raised at the Crucifixion,—what of them?” I asked.
“I cannot help conjecturing that they were suffered to forget their glimpse of spiritual life,” she said. “Since their resurrection was a miracle, there might be a miracle throughout. At least, their lips must have been sealed, for not a word of their testimony has been saved. When Lazarus dined with Simon, after hehad come back to life,—and of that feast we have a minute account in, I believe, every Gospel,—nobody seems to have asked, or he to have answered, any questions about it.
“The other reason is a sorrowfully sufficient one. It is thateverylost darling has not gone to heaven. Of all the mercies that our Father has given, this blessed uncertainty, this long unbroken silence, may be the dearest. Bitterly hard for you and me, but what are thousands like you and me weighed against one who stands beside a hopeless grave? Think a minute what mourners there have been, andwhomthey have mourned! Ponder one such solitary instance as that of Vittoria Colonna, wondering, through her widowed years, if she could ever be ‘good enough’ to join wicked Pescara in another world! This poor earth holds—God only knows how many, God make them very few!—Vittorias. Ah, Mary, what right have we to complain?”
9th.
To-night Aunt Winifred had callers,—Mrs. Quirk and (O Homer aristocracy!) the butcher’s wife,—and it fell to my lot to put Faith to bed.
The little maiden seriously demurred. Cousin Mary was very good,—O yes, she was good enough,—but her mamma was a great deal gooder; and why couldn’t little peoples sit up till nine o’clock as well as big peoples, she should like to know!
Finally, she came to the gracious conclusion that perhaps I’ddo, made me carry her all the way up stairs, and dropped, like a little lump of lead, half asleep, on my shoulder, before two buttons were unfastened.
Feeling under some sort of theological obligation to hear her say her prayers, I pulled her curls a little till she awoke, and went through with “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pway ve Lord,” triumphantly. I supposed that was the end, but it seems that she has been also taught the Lord’s Prayer, which she gave me promptly to understand.
“O, see here! That isn’t all. I can say Our Father, and you’ve got to help me a lot!”
This very soon became a self-evident proposition; but by our united efforts we managed, after tribulations manifold, to arrive successfully at “For ever ’n’ ever ’n’ ever ’n’A-men.”
“Dear me,” she said, jumping up with ayawn, “I think that’s adreadful long-tailed prayer,—don’t you, Cousin Mary?”
“Now I must kiss mamma good night,” she announced, when she was tucked up at last.
“But mamma kissed you good night before you came up.”
“O, so she did. Yes, I ’member. Well, it’s papa I’ve got to kiss. I knew there was somebody.”
I looked at her in perplexity.
“Why, there!” she said, “in the upper drawer,—my pretty little papa in a purple frame. Don’t you know?”
I went to the bureau-drawer, and found in a case of velvet a small ivory painting of her father. This I brought, wondering, and the child took it reverently and kissed the pictured lips.
“Faith,” I said, as I laid it softly back, “do you always do this?”
“Do what? Kiss papa good night? O yes, I’ve done that ever since I was a little girl, you know. I guess I’ve always kissed him pretty much. When I’m a naughty girl he feelsrealsorry. He’s gone to heaven. I like him. O yes, and then, when I’m through kissing, mamma kisses him too.”
June 11.
I was in her room this afternoon while she was dressing. I like to watch her brush her beautiful gray hair; it quite alters her face to have it down; it seems to shrine her in like a cloud, and the outlines of her cheeks round out, and she grows young.
“I used to be proud of my hair when I was a girl,” she said with a slight blush, as she saw me looking at her; “it was all I had to be vain of, and I made the most of it. Ah well! I was dark-haired three years ago.
“O you regular old woman!” she added, smiling at herself in the mirror, as she twisted the silver coils flashing through her fingers. “Well, when I am in heaven, I shall have my pretty brown hair again.”
It seemed odd enough to hear that; then the next minute it did not seem odd at all, but the most natural thing in the world.
June 14.
She said nothing to me about the anniversary, and, though it has been in my thoughtsall the time, I said nothing to her. I thought that she would shut herself up for the day, and was rather surprised that she was about as usual, busily at work, chatting with me, and playing with Faith. Just after tea, she went away alone for a time, and came back a little quiet, but that was all. I was for some reason impressed with the feeling that she kept the day in memory, not so much as the day of her mourning, as of his release.
Longing to do something for her, yet not knowing what to do, I went into the garden while she was away, and, finding some carnations, that shone like stars in the dying light, I gathered them all, and took them to her room, and, filling my tiny porphyry vase, left them on the bracket, under the photograph of Uncle Forceythe that hangs by the window.
When she found them, she called me, and kissed me.
“Thank you, dear,” she said, “and thank God too, Mary, for me. That he should have been happy,—happy and out of pain, for three long beautiful years! O, think of that!”
When I was in her room with the flowers, I passed the table on which her little Bible lay open. A mark of rich ribbon—a black ribbon—fell across the pages; it bore in silver text these words:—