Auntie says many such things. I cannot explain how pleasantly they strike me, nor how they help me.
29th.
Dr. Bland gave us a good sermon yesterday. There is an indescribable change in all his sermons. There is a change, too, in the man, and that something more than the haggardness of grief. I not only respect him and am sorry for him, but I feel more ready to be taught by him than ever before. A certain indefinable humanness softens his eyes and tones, and seems to be creeping into everything that he says. Yet, on the other hand, his people say that they have never heard him speak such pleasant, helpful things concerning his and their relations to God. I met him the other night, coming away from his wife’s grave, and was struck by the expression of his face. I wondered if he were not slowly finding the “peaceful day,” of which he told Aunt Winifred.
She, by the way, has taken another of her mysterious trips to Worcester.
30th.
We were wondering to-day where it will be,—I mean heaven.
“It is impossible to do more than wonder,” Auntie said, “though we are explicitly told that there will be new heavens and a new earth, which seems, if anything can be taken literally in the Bible, to point to this world as the future home of at least some of us.”
“Not for all of us, of course?”
“I don’t feel sure. I know that somebody spent his valuable time in estimating that all the people who have lived and died upon the earth would cover it, alive or buried, twice over; but I know that somebody else claims with equal solemnity to have discovered that they could all be buried in the State of Pennsylvania! But it would be of little consequence if we could not all find room here, since there must be other provision for us.”
“Why?”