Oh, my sister, this is a part of the divine discipline! If it were
best for you, all you would have to do would be to open the front
windows and the ravens would fly in with food; and after you had baked
fifty times from the barrel in the pantry the barrel, like the one of
Zarephath, would be full; and the shoes of the children would last as
long as the shoes of the Israelites in the wilderness--forty years.
Beside that, this is going to make heaven the more attractive in the
contrast. They never hunger there, and consequently there will be none
of the nuisances of catering for appetites. And in the land of the
white robe they never have to mend anything, and the air in that hill
country makes everybody well. There are no rents to pay; every man
owns his own house, and a mansion at that.
It will not be so great a change for you to have a chariot in heaven
if you have been in the habit of riding in this world. It will not be
so great a change for you to sit down on the banks of the river of
life if in this world you had a country-seat; but if you have walked
with tired feet in this world what a glorious change to mount
celestial equipage; and if your life on earth was domestic martyrdom,
oh, the joy of an eternity in which you shall have nothing to do
except what you choose to do! Martha has had no drudgery for eighteen
centuries! I quarrel with the theologians who want to distribute all
the thrones of heaven among the John Knoxes and the Hugh Latimers, and
the Theban Legion. Some of the brightest thrones of heaven will be
kept for Christian housekeepers. Oh, what a change from here to
there--from the time when they put down the rolling-pin to when they
take up the sceptre! If Chatsworth Park and the Vanderbilt mansion on
Fifth Avenue were to be lifted into the celestial city they would be
considered uninhabitable rookeries, and glorified Lazarus would be
ashamed to be seen going in and out of either of them.