The story of the Last Trump begins in Heaven and it ends in all sorts
of places round about the world....
Heaven, you must know, is a kindly place, and the blessed ones do not
go on for ever singing Alleluia, whatever you may have been told. For
they too are finite creatures, and must be fed with their eternity in
little bits, as one feeds a chick or a child. So that there are
mornings and changes and freshness, there is time to condition their
lives. And the children are still children, gravely eager about their
playing and ready always for new things; just children they are, but
blessed as you see them in the pictures beneath the careless feet of
the Lord God. And one of these blessed children routing about in an
attic--for Heaven is, of course, full of the most heavenly attics,
seeing that it has children--came upon a number of instruments stored
away, and laid its little chubby hands upon them....
Now indeed I cannot tell what these instruments were, for to do so
would be to invade mysteries.... But one I may tell of, and that was a
great brazen trumpet which the Lord God had made when He made the
world--for the Lord God finishes all His jobs--to blow when the time
for our Judgement came round. And He had made it and left it; there it
was, and everything was settled exactly as the Doctrine of
Predestination declares. And this blessed child conceived one of those
unaccountable passions of childhood for its smoothness and brassiness,
and he played with it and tried to blow it, and trailed it about with
him out of the attic into the gay and golden streets, and, after many
fitful wanderings, to those celestial battlements of crystal of which
you have doubtless read. And there the blessed child fell to counting
the stars, and forgot all about the Trumpet beside him until a
flourish of his elbow sent it over....
Down fell the trump, spinning as it fell, and for a day or so, which
seemed but moments in heaven, the blessed child watched its fall until
it was a glittering little speck of brightness....
When it looked a second time the trump was gone....
I do not know what happened to that child when at last it was time for
Judgement Day and that shining trumpet was missed. I know that
Judgement Day is long overpassed, because of the wickedness of the
world; I think perhaps it was in A.D. 1000 when the expected Day
should have dawned that never came, but no other heavenly particulars
do I know at all, because now my scene changes to the narrow ways of
this Earth....
And the Prologue in Heaven ends.