He looked at me and passed his hand before his mouth.
“No, I am not clever enough for that,” he remarked quietly.
“Which way did you come?” Philemon asked.
“I came direct from hell and caught a glimpse of earth as I passed. You may be thankful you are out of it, Genius; those who dispatched you did the greatest kindness. I find earth depressing, I never wish to stay there.”
“If it depresses you, why do you not tear away the chain and the mist?”
He shook his head, then smiled.
“We have given humanity a free will, which is gift enough of its kind. If they wish to tear away the chain and grope through the mist to the light, all well and good, but we will raise neither hand nor foot to help them. Because, after all, if heaven is worth winning it is worth fighting for and struggling for. We have little sympathy with those who would walk in in respectable dignity and comfort. Man, by a perfect irony, has been born to walk upright, but if he arrives at heaven it is generally by crawling on all fours.”
“You do not grudge them heaven, then, if they attain it?”
“Not at all. Though we often maintain the contest to the last hour. Look at Philemon here. On the earth he was a little shoemaker who died in consumption. He had a nagging wife and two children to support. I think if I remember rightly he was only in bed three days before he died, and the smell of leather is not pleasant. Now that is what I call a hero, for he never complained, and was so humble as to imagine himself no better than those around him; indeed, if anything, he imagined himself inferior by his lack of physical strength.”
Philemon took this sketch of himself as unconcernedly as if he had been an outsider.