“We should subdue our earthly affections to God.
“We must not love the creature as the Creator. My son, give _me_ thy
heart. When he removes our friends from the scenes of time (with a
glance in my direction), we should resign ourselves to his will,
remembering that the Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away in mercy;
that He is all in all; that He will never leave us nor forsake us; that
_He_ can never change or die.”
As if that made any difference with the fact, that his best treasures
change or die!
“In conclusion,--
“We infer from our text that our hearts should not be set upon earthly
happiness. (Enlarged.)
“That the subject of heaven should be often in our thoughts and on our
lips.” (Enlarged.)
Of course I have not done justice to the filling up of the sermon; to
the illustrations, metaphors, proof-texts, learning, and
eloquence,--for, though Dr. Bland cannot seem to think outside of the
old grooves, a little eloquence really flashes through the tameness of
his style sometimes, and when he was talking about the harpers, etc.,
some of his words were well chosen. “To be drowned in light,” I have
somewhere read, “may be very beautiful; it is still to be drowned.” But
I have given the skeleton of the discourse, and I have given the sum of
the impressions that it left on me, an attentive hearer. It is fortunate
that I did not hear it while I was alone; it would have made me
desperate. Going hungry, hopeless, blinded, I came back empty,
uncomforted, groping. I wanted something actual, something pleasant,
about this place into which Roy has gone. He gave me glittering
generalities, cold commonplace, vagueness, unreality, a God and a future
at which I sat and shivered.
Dr. Bland is a good man. He had, I know, written that sermon with
prayer. I only wish that he could be made to _see_ how it glides over
and sails splendidly away from wants like mine.
But thanks be to God who has provided a voice to answer me out of the
deeps.
Auntie and I walked home without any remarks (we overheard Deacon Quirk
observe to a neighbor: “That’s what I call a good gospel sermon, now!”),
sent Faith away to Phœbe, sat down in the parlor, and looked at each
other.
“Well?” said I.
“I know it,” said she.
Upon which we both began to laugh.
“But did he say the dreadful truth?”
“Not as I find it in my Bible.”
“That it is probable, only _probable_ that we shall recognize--”
“My child, do not be troubled about that. It is not probable, it is
sure. If I could find no proof for it, I should none the less believe
it, as long as I believe in God. He gave you Roy, and the capacity to
love him. He has taught you to sanctify that love through love to Him.
Would it be _like_ Him to create such beautiful and unselfish
loves,--most like the love of heaven of any type we know,--just for our
threescore years and ten of earth? Would it be like Him to suffer two
souls to grow together here, so that the separation of a day is pain,
and then wrench them apart for all eternity? It would be what Madame de
Gasparin calls, ‘fearful irony on the part of God.’”
“But there are lost loves. There are lost souls.”
“‘How often would I have gathered you, and ye would not!’ That is not
his work. He would have saved both soul and love. They had their own
way. We were speaking of His redeemed. The object of having this world
at all, you know, is to fit us for another. Of what use will it have
been, if on passing out of it we must throw by forever its gifts, its
lessons, its memories? God links things together better than that. Be
sure, as you are sure of Him, that we shall be _ourselves_ in heaven.
Would you be yourself not to recognize Roy?--consequently, not to love
Roy, for to love and to be separated is misery, and heaven is joy.”
“I understand. But you said you had other proof.”
“So I have; plenty of it. If ‘many shall come from the East and from the
West, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God with Abraham, Isaac, and
Jacob,’ will they not be likely to know that they are with Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob? or will they think it is Shadrach, Meshech, and
Abednego?
“What is meant by such expressions as ‘risen _together_,’ ‘sitting
_together_ at the right hand of God,’ ‘sitting _together_ in heavenly
places’? If they mean anything, they mean recognitions, friendships,
enjoyments.
“Did not Peter and the others know Moses when they saw him?--know Elias
when they saw him? Yet these men were dead hundreds of years before the
favored fishermen were born.
“How was it with those ‘saints which slept and arose’ when Christ hung
dead there in the dark? Were they not seen of many?”
“But that was a miracle.”
“They were risen dead, such as you and I shall be some day. The miracle
consisted in their rising then and there. Moreover, did not the beggar
recognize Abraham? and--Well, one might go through the Bible finding it
full of this promise in hints or assertions, in parables or visions. We
are ‘heirs of God,’ ‘joint heirs with Christ’; having suffered with Him,
we shall be ‘glorified _together_.’ Christ himself has said many sure
things: ‘I will come and receive you, that where I am, there ye may be.’
‘I will that they be with me where I am.’ Using, too, the very type of
Godhead to signify the eternal nearness and eternal love of just such as
you and Roy as John and me, he prays: ‘Holy Father, keep them whom Thou
hast given me, that _they may be one as we are_.’
“There is one place, though, where I find what I like better than all
the rest; you remember that old cry wrung from the lips of the stricken
king,--‘I shall go to him; but he will not return to me.’”
“I never thought before how simple and direct it is; and that, too, in
those old blinded days.”
“The more I study the Bible,” she said, “and I study not entirely in
ignorance of the commentators and the mysteries, the more perplexed I am
to imagine where the current ideas of our future come from. They
certainly are not in this book of gracious promises. That heaven which
we heard about to-day was Dr. Bland’s, not God’s. ‘It’s aye a wonderfu’
thing to me,’ as poor Lauderdale said, ‘the way some preachers take it
upon themselves to explain matters to the Almighty!’”
“But the harps and choirs, the throne, the white robes, are all in
Revelation. Deacon Quirk would put his great brown finger on the verses,
and hold you there triumphantly.”
“Can’t people tell picture from substance, a metaphor from its meaning?
That book of Revelation is precisely what it professes to be,--a vision;
a symbol. A symbol of something, to be sure, and rich with pleasant
hopes, but still a symbol. Now, I really believe that a large
proportion of Christian church-members, who have studied their Bible,
attended Sabbath schools, listened to sermons all their lives, if you
could fairly come at their most definite idea of the place where they
expect to spend eternity, would own it to be the golden city, with pearl
gates, and jewels in the wall. It never occurs to them, that, if one
picture is literal, another must be. If we are to walk golden streets,
how can we stand on a sea of glass? How can we ‘sit on thrones’? How can
untold millions of us ‘lie in Abraham’s bosom’?
“But why have given us empty symbols? Why not a little fact?”
“They are not _empty_ symbols. And why God did not give us actual
descriptions of actual heavenly life, I don’t trouble myself to wonder.
He certainly had his reasons, and that is enough for me. I find from
these symbols, and from his voice in my own heart, many beautiful
things,--I will tell you some more of them at another time,--and, for
the rest, I am content to wait. He loves me, and he loves mine. As long
as we love Him, He will never separate Himself from us, or us from each
other. That, at least, is _sure_.”
“If that is sure, the rest is of less importance;--yes. But Dr. Bland
said an awful thing!”
“The quotation from a dead divine?”
“Yes. That there will be no separate interests, no thoughts to conceal.”
“Poor good man! He has found out by this time that he should not have
laid down nonsense like that, without qualification or demur, before a
Bible-reading hearer. It was simply _his_ opinion, not David’s, or
Paul’s, or John’s, or Isaiah’s. He had a perfect right to put it in the
form of a conjecture. Nobody would forbid his conjecturing that the
inhabitants of heaven are all deaf and dumb, or wear green glasses, or
shave their heads, if he chose, provided he stated that it was
conjecture, not revelation.”
“But where does the Bible say that we shall have power to conceal our
thoughts?--and I would rather be annihilated than to spend eternity with
heart laid bare,--the inner temple thrown open to be trampled on by
every passing stranger!”
“The Bible specifies very little about the minor arrangements of
eternity in any way. But I doubt if, under any circumstances, it would
have occurred to inspired men to inform us that our thoughts shall
continue to be our own. The fact is patent on the face of things. The
dead minister’s supposition would destroy individuality at one fell
swoop. We should be like a man walking down a room lined with mirrors,
who sees himself reflected in all sizes, colors, shades, at all angles
and in all proportions, according to the capacity of the mirror, till he
seems no longer to belong to himself, but to be cut up into ellipses and
octagons and prisms. How soon would he grow frantic in such
companionship, and beg for a corner where he might hide and hush himself
in the dark?
“That we shall in a higher life be able to do what we cannot in
this,--judge fairly of each other’s _moral_ worth,--is undoubtedly true.
Whatever the Judgment Day may mean, that is the substance of it. But
this promiscuous theory of refraction;--never!
“Besides, wherever the Bible touches the subject, it premises our
individuality as a matter of course. What would be the use of talking,
if everybody knew the thoughts of everybody else?”
“You don’t suppose that people talk in heaven?”
“I don’t suppose anything else. Are we to spend ages of joy, a company
of mutes together? Why not talk?”
“I supposed we should sing,--but--”
“Why not talk as well as sing? Does not song involve the faculty of
speech?--unless you would like to make canaries of us.”
“Ye-es. Why, yes.”
“There are the visitors at the beautiful Mount of Transfiguration again.
Did not they _talk_ with each other and with Christ? Did not John _talk_
with the angel who ‘shewed him those things’?”
“And you mean to say--”
“I mean to say that if there is such a thing as common sense, you will
talk with Roy as you talked with him here,--only not as you talked with
him here, because there will be no troubles nor sins, no anxieties nor
cares, to talk about; no ugly shades of cross words or little quarrels
to be made up; no fearful looking-for of separation.”
I laid my head upon her shoulder, and could hardly speak for the comfort
that she gave me.
“Yes, I believe we shall talk and laugh and joke and play--”
“Laugh and joke in heaven?”
“Why not?”
“But it seems so--so--why, so wicked and irreverent and all that, you
know.”
Just then Faith, who, mounted out on the kitchen table, was preaching at
Phœbe in comical mimicry of Dr. Bland’s choicest intonations, laughed
out like the splash of a little wave.
The sound came in at the open door, and we stopped to listen till it had
rippled away.
“There!” said her mother, “put that child, this very minute, with all
her little sins forgiven, into one of our dear Lord’s many mansions, and
do you suppose that she would be any the less holy or less reverent for
a laugh like that? Is he going to check all the sparkle and blossom of
life when he takes us to himself? I don’t believe any such thing. There
were both sense and Christianity in what somebody wrote on the death of
a humorous poet:--
‘Does nobody laugh there, where he has gone,--
This man of the smile and the jest?’
--provided there was any hope that the poor fellow _had_ gone to heaven;
if not, it was bad philosophy and worse religion. Did not David dance
before the Lord with all his might? A Bible which is full of happy
battle-cries: ‘Rejoice in the Lord! make a joyful noise unto him! Give
thanks unto the Lord, for his mercy endureth!’--a Bible which exhausts
its splendid wealth of rhetoric to make us understand that the coming
life is a life of _joy_, no more threatens to make nuns than mutes of
us. I expect that you will hear some of Roy’s very old jokes, see the
sparkle in his eye, listen to his laughing voice, lighten up the happy
days as gleefully as you may choose; and that--”
Faith appeared upon the scene just then, with the interesting
information that she had bitten her tongue; so we talked no more.
How pleasant--how pleasant this is! I never supposed before that God
would let any one laugh in heaven.
I wonder if Roy has seen the President. Aunt Winifred says she does not
doubt it. She thinks that all the soldiers must have crowded up to meet
him, and “O,” she says, “what a sight to see!”