... have gone away, side by side,
Leaving doors and windows wide;
Careless tenants they!
And they may well be careless, because in the heavens they have
another mansion, incorruptible and glorious.
We leave the 'tent'; we enter the 'building.' There is nothing here
of some germ of immortality being somehow extricated from the ruins,
and fostered into glorious growth. Or, to take another metaphor of
the context, we strip off the garment and are naked; and then we are
clothed with another garment and are not found naked. The
resurrection of the dead is the clothing of the spirit with the house
which is from heaven. And there is as much difference between the two
habitations as there is between the grim, solid architecture
of northern peoples, amidst snow and ice, needed to resist the
blasts, and to keep the life within in an ungenial climate, and the
light, graceful dwellings of those who walk in an atmosphere of
perpetual sunshine in the tropics, as there is between the close-knit
and narrow-windowed and narrow-doored abode in which we now have to
pass our days, and that large house, with broad windows that take in
a mightier sweep and new senses that have relation with new qualities
in the world then around us. Therefore let us, whilst we grope in the
dark here, and live in a narrow hovel in a back street, look forward
to the time when we shall dwell on the sunny heights in the great
pavilion which God prepares for them that love Him.