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 glory of God, you see, the glory of
God is the primary consideration.”
“But the glory of God _involves_ these 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 to _balance_ truth.”
It had been in my mind for several days to ask Aunt Winifred something,
and, feeling in the 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?”
“What _is_ it?”
“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 mean _something_. 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 shalt _be
with me_.’ Paul’s beautiful perplexed 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 the
_tendency_ of 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 body immediately 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 a dinner 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 shall _not_ rise 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 that _something_ belonging 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 identity as 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 I _had_ to go to heaven, whether, after a hundred
years, God would 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 a _body_, 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 of the 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, simply future 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 celestial _bodies_.’ ‘It is raised a spiritual _body_.’
‘There is a spiritual _body_.’ ‘It _is_ raised in incorruption.’ ‘It
_is_ raised in glory.’ ‘It _is_ raised in power.’ Moses, too, when he
came to the transfigured mount in glory, had as real a _body_ as 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.”