“Yes, with the very feet which trod the dusty road to Emmaus; the very
wounded hands which Thomas touched, believing; the very lips which ate
of the broiled fish and honeycomb; the very voice which murmured ‘Mary!’
in the garden, and which told her that He ascended unto His Father and
her Father, to His God and her God, He ‘was parted from them,’ and was
‘received up into heaven.’ His death and resurrection stand forever the
great prototype of ours. Otherwise, what is the meaning of such
statements as these: ‘When He shall appear, we shall be _like Him_’;
‘The first man (Adam) is of the earth; the second man is the Lord. As we
have borne the image of the earthy, _we shall also bear the image of the
heavenly_’? And what of this, when we are told that our ‘vile bodies,’
being changed, shall be fashioned ‘_like unto His glorious body_’?”
I asked her if she inferred from that, that we should have just such
bodies as the freedom from pain and sin would make of these.
“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom,” she said. “There is no
escaping that, even if I had the smallest desire to escape it, which I
have not. Whatever is essentially earthly and temporary in the
arrangements of this world will be out of place and unnecessary there.
Earthly and temporary, flesh and blood certainly are.”
“Christ said, ‘A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.’”
“A _spirit_ hath not; and who ever said that it did? His body had
something that appeared like them, certainly. That passage, by the way,
has led some ingenious writer on the Chemistry of Heaven to infer that
our bodies there will be like these, minus _blood_! I don’t propose to
spend my time over such investigations. Summing up the meaning of the
story of those last days before the Ascension, and granting the shade of
mystery which hangs over them, I gather this,--that the spiritual body
is real, is tangible, is visible, is human, but that ‘we shall be
changed.’ Some indefinable but thorough change had come over Him. He
could withdraw Himself from the recognition of Mary, and from the
disciples, whose ‘eyes were holden,’ as it pleased Him. He came and went
through barred and bolted doors. He appeared suddenly in a certain
place, without sound of footstep or flutter of garment to announce His
approach. He vanished, and was not, like a cloud. New and wonderful
powers had been given to Him, of which, probably, His little bewildered
group of friends saw but a few illustrations.”
“And He was yet _man_?”
“He was Jesus of Nazareth until the sorrowful drama of human life that
He had taken upon Himself was thoroughly finished, from manger to
sepulchre, and from sepulchre to the right hand of His Father.”
“I like to wonder,” she said, presently, “what we are going to look like
and be like. _Ourselves_, in the first place. ‘It is I Myself,’ Christ
said. Then to be perfectly well, never a sense of pain or
weakness,--imagine how much solid comfort, if one had no other, in being
forever rid of all the ills that flesh is heir to! Beautiful, too, I
suppose we shall be, every one. Have you never had that come over you,
with a thrill of compassionate thankfulness, when you have seen a poor
girl shrinking, as only girls can shrink, under the life-long affliction
of a marred face or form? The loss or presence of beauty is not as
slight a deprivation or blessing as the moralists would make it out.
Your grandmother, who was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, the
belle of the county all her young days, and the model for artists’ fancy
sketching even in her old ones, as modest as a violet and as honest as
the sunshine, used to have the prettiest little way when we girls were
in our teens, and she thought that we must be lectured a bit on youthful
vanity, of adding, in her quiet voice, smoothing down her black silk
apron as she spoke, ‘But still it is a thing to be thankful for, my
dear, to have a _comely countenance_.’
“But to return to the track and our future bodies. We shall find them
vastly convenient, undoubtedly, with powers of which there is no
dreaming. Perhaps they will be so one with the soul that to will will be
to do,--hindrance out of the question. I, for instance, sitting here by
you, and thinking that I should like to be in Kansas, would be there.
There is an interesting bit of a hint in Daniel about Gabriel, who,
‘being caused to fly swiftly, touched him about the time of the evening
oblation.’”
“But do you not make a very material kind of heaven out of such
suppositions?”
“It depends upon what you mean by ‘material.’ The term does not, to my
thinking, imply degradation, except so far as it is associated with
sin. Dr. Chalmers has the right of it, when he talks about ‘_spiritual
materialism_.’ He says in his sermon on the New Heavens and
Earth,--which, by the way, you should read, and from which I wish a few
more of our preachers would learn something,--that we ‘forget that on
the birth of materialism, when it stood out in the freshness of those
glories which the great Architect of Nature had impressed upon it, that
then the “morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted
for joy.”’ I do not believe in a _gross_ heaven, but I believe in a
_reasonable_ one.”
4th.
We have been devoting ourselves to feminine vanities all day out in the
orchard. Aunt Winifred has been making her summer bonnet, and I some
linen collars. I saw, though she said nothing, that she thought the
_crêpe_ a little gloomy, and I am going to wear these in the mornings to
please her.
She has an accumulation of work on hand, and in the afternoon I offered
to tuck a little dress for Faith,--the prettiest pink _barège_ affair
pale as a blush rose, and about as delicate. Faith, who had been making
mud-pies in the swamp, and was spattered with black peat from curls to
stockings, looked on approvingly, and wanted it to wear on a flag-root
expedition to-morrow. It seemed to do me good to do something for
somebody after all this lonely and--I suspect--selfish idleness.
6th.
I read a little of Dr. Chalmers to-day, and went laughing to Aunt
Winifred with the first sentence.
“There is a limit to the revelations of the Bible about futurity, and it
were a mental or spiritual trespass to go beyond it.”
“Ah! but,” she said, “look a little farther down.”
And I read, “But while we attempt not to be ‘wise above that which is
written,’ we should attempt, and that most studiously, to be wise _up_
to that which is written.”
8th.
It occurred to me to-day, that it was a noticeable fact, that, among all
the visits of angels to this world of which we are told, no one seems to
have discovered in any the presence of a dead friend. If redeemed men
are subject to the same laws as they, why did such a thing never happen?
I asked Aunt Winifred, and she said that the question reminded her of
St. Augustine’s lonely cry thirty years after the death of Monica: “Ah,
the dead do not come back; for, had it been possible, there has not been
a night when I should not have seen my mother!” There seemed to be two
reasons, she said, why there should be no exceptions to the law of
silence imposed between us and those who have left us; one of which was,
that we should be overpowered with familiar curiosity about them, which
nobody seems to have dared to express in the presence of angels, and the
secrets of their life God has decreed that it is unlawful to utter.
“But Lazarus, and Jairus’s little daughter, and the dead raised at the
Crucifixion,--what of them?” I asked.
“I cannot help conjecturing that they were suffered to forget their
glimpse of spiritual life,” she said. “Since their resurrection was a
miracle, there might be a miracle throughout. At least, their lips must
have been sealed, for not a word of their testimony has been saved. When
Lazarus dined with Simon, after he had come back to life,--and of that
feast we have a minute account in, I believe, every Gospel,--nobody
seems to have asked, or he to have answered, any questions about it.
“The other reason is a sorrowfully sufficient one. It is that _every_
lost darling has not gone to heaven. Of all the mercies that our Father
has given, this blessed uncertainty, this long unbroken silence, may be
the dearest. Bitterly hard for you and me, but what are thousands like
you and me weighed against one who stands beside a hopeless grave? Think
a minute what mourners there have been, and _whom_ they have mourned!
Ponder one such solitary instance as that of Vittoria Colonna,
wondering, through her widowed years, if she could ever be ‘good enough’
to join wicked Pescara in another world! This poor earth holds--God only
knows how many, God make them very few!--Vittorias. Ah, Mary, what right
have we to complain?”
9th.
To-night Aunt Winifred had callers,--Mrs. Quirk and (O Homer
aristocracy!) the butcher’s wife,--and it fell to my lot to put Faith to
bed.
The little maiden seriously demurred. Cousin Mary was very good,--O yes,
she was good enough,--but her mamma was a great deal gooder; and why
couldn’t little peoples sit up till nine o’clock as well as big peoples,
she should like to know!
Finally, she came to the gracious conclusion that perhaps I’d _do_, made
me carry her all the way up stairs, and dropped, like a little lump of
lead, half asleep, on my shoulder, before two buttons were unfastened.
Feeling under some sort of theological obligation to hear her say her
prayers, I pulled her curls a little till she awoke, and went through
with “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pway ve Lord,” triumphantly. I
supposed that was the end, but it seems that she has been also taught
the Lord’s Prayer, which she gave me promptly to understand.
“O, see here! That isn’t all. I can say Our Father, and you’ve got to
help me a lot!”
This very soon became a self-evident proposition; but by our united
efforts we managed, after tribulations manifold, to arrive successfully
at “For ever ’n’ ever ’n’ ever ’n’ _A_-men.”
“Dear me,” she said, jumping up with a yawn, “I think that’s a
_dreadful long-tailed prayer_,--don’t you, Cousin Mary?”
“Now I must kiss mamma good night,” she announced, when she was tucked
up at last.
“But mamma kissed you good night before you came up.”
“O, so she did. Yes, I ’member. Well, it’s papa I’ve got to kiss. I knew
there was somebody.”