“None need fear the consequences of such endeavors who have well learned
the prime principle of sound philosophy, namely, not to allow the most
plausible and pleasing conjectures to unsettle our convictions of truth
... resting upon positive evidence. If there be any who frown upon all
such attempts, ... they would do well to consider, that although
individually, and from the constitution of their minds, they may find it
very easy to abstain from every path of excursive meditation, it is not
so with others who almost irresistibly are borne forward to the vast
field of universal contemplation,--a field from which the human mind is
not to be barred, and which is better taken possession of by those who
reverently bow to the authority of Christianity, than left open to
impiety.”
“Very good,” I said, laying down the book. “But about those trees and
houses, and the rest of your ‘pretty things’? Are they to be like
these?”
“I don’t suppose that the houses will be made of oak and pine and nailed
together, for instance. But I hope for heavenly types of nature and of
art. _Something that will be to us then what these are now._ That is the
amount of it. They may be as ‘spiritual’ as you please; they will answer
all the purpose to us. As we are not spiritual beings yet, however, I am
under the necessity of calling them by their earthly names. You remember
Plato’s old theory, that the ideal of everything exists eternally in the
mind of God. If that is so,--and I do not see how it can be
otherwise,--then whatever of God is expressed to us in this world by
flower, or blade of grass, or human face, why should not that be
expressed forever in heaven by something corresponding to flower, or
grass, or human face? I do not mean that the heavenly creation will be
less real than these, but more so. Their ‘spirituality is of such a
sort that our gardens and forests and homes are but shadows of them.
“You don’t know how I amuse myself at night thinking this all over
before I go to sleep; wondering what one thing will be like, and another
thing; planning what I should like; thinking that John has seen it all,
and wondering if he is laughing at me because I know so little about it!
I tell you, Mary, there’s a ‘deal o’ comfort in ’t’ as Phœbe says
about her cup of tea.”
July 5.
Aunt Winifred has been hunting up a Sunday school class for herself and
one for me; which is a venture that I never was persuaded into
undertaking before. She herself is fast becoming acquainted with the
poorer people of the town.
I find that she is a thoroughly busy Christian, with a certain “week-day
holiness” that is strong and refreshing, like a west wind. Church-going,
and conversations on heaven, by no means exhaust her vitality.
She told me a pretty thing about her class; it happened the first
Sabbath that she took it. Her scholars are young girls of from fourteen
to eighteen years of age, children of church-members, most of them. She
seemed to have taken their hearts by storm. _She_ says, “They treated me
very prettily, and made me love them at once.”
Clo Bentley is in the class; Clo is a pretty, soft-eyed little creature,
with a shrinking mouth, and an absorbing passion for music, which she
has always been too poor to gratify. I suspect that her teacher will
make a pet of her. She says that in the course of her lesson, or, in her
words,--
“While we were all talking together, somebody pulled my sleeve, and
there was Clo in the corner, with her great brown eyes fixed on me. ‘See
here!’ she said in a whisper, ‘I can’t be good! I would be good if I
could _only_ just have a piano!’ ‘Well, Clo,’ I said, ‘if you will be a
good girl, and go to heaven, I think you will have a piano there, and
play just as much as you care to.’
“You ought to have seen the look the child gave me! Delight and fear and
incredulous bewilderment tumbled over each other, as if I had proposed
taking her into a forbidden fairy-land.
“‘Why, Mrs. Forceythe! Why, they won’t let anybody have a piano up
there! not in _heaven_?’
“I laid down the question-book, and asked what kind of place she
supposed that heaven was going to be.
“‘O,’ she said, with a dreary sigh, ‘I never think about it when I can
help it. I suppose we _shall all just stand there_!’
“And you?” I asked of the next, a bright girl with snapping eyes.
“‘Do you want me to talk good, or tell the truth?’ she answered me.
Having been given to understand that she was not expected to ‘talk good’
in my class, she said, with an approving, decided nod: ‘Well, then! I
don’t think it’s going to be _anything nice_ anyway. No, I don’t! I told
my last teacher so, and she looked just as shocked, and said I never
should go there as long as I felt so. That made me mad, and I told her I
didn’t see but I should be as well off in one place as another, except
for the fire.’
“A silent girl in the corner began at this point to look interested. ‘I
always supposed,’ said she, ‘that you just floated round in heaven--you
know--all together--something like ju-jube paste!’
“Whereupon I shut the question-book entirely, and took the talking to
myself for a while.
“‘But I _never_ thought it was anything like that,’ interrupted little
Clo, presently, her cheeks flushed with excitement. ‘Why, I should like
to go, if it is like that! I never supposed people talked, unless it was
about converting people, and saying your prayers, and all that.’
“Now, weren’t those ideas[B] alluring and comforting for young girls in
the blossom of warm human life? They were trying with all their little
hearts to ‘be good,’ too, some of them, and had all of them been to
church and Sunday school all their lives. Never, never, if Jesus Christ
had been Teacher and Preacher to them, would He have pictured their
blessed endless years with Him in such bleak colors. They are not the
hues of His Bible.”
[B] Facts.