 | IX. The gates ajar |  |
9. IX.
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
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 has n'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,
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
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;
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
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
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
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
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
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 semicircles
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
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
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.”
I had never thought of that, and said so.
“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 honey-comb;
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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 could n'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 is n'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
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.”
I looked at her in perplexity.
“Why, there!” she said, “in the upper
drawer, — my pretty little papa in a purple
frame. Don't you know?”
I went to the bureau-drawer, and found in a
case of velvet a small ivory painting of her
father. This I brought, wondering, and the
child took it reverently and kissed the pictured
lips.
“Faith,” I said, as I laid it softly back, “do
you always do this?”
“Do what? Kiss papa good night? O
yes, I 've done that ever since I was a little
girl, you know. I guess I 've always kissed
him pretty much. When I 'm a naughty girl
he feels real sorry. He 's gone to heaven. I
like him. O yes, and then, when I 'm through
kissing, mamma kisses him too.”
| IX. The gates ajar | |