“‘How often would I have gathered you, and ye would not!’ That is not his work. He would have saved both soul and love. They had their own way. We were speaking of His redeemed. The object of having this world at all, you know, is to fit us for another. Of what use will it have been, if on passing out of it we must throw by forever its gifts, its lessons, its memories? God links things together better than that. Be sure, as you are sure of Him, that we shall be ourselves in heaven. Would you be yourself not to recognize Roy?—consequently, not to love Roy, for to love and to be separated is misery, and heaven is joy.”
“I understand. But you said you had other proof.”
“So I have; plenty of it. If ‘many shall come from the East and from the West, and shall sit down in the kingdom of God with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,’ will they not be likely to know that they are with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? or will they think it is Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego?
“What is meant by such expressions as ‘risen together,’ ‘sitting together at the right hand of God,’ ‘sitting together in heavenly places’? If they mean anything, they mean recognitions, friendships, enjoyments.
“Did not Peter and the others know Moses when they saw him?—know Elias when they saw him? Yet these men were dead hundreds of years before the favored fishermen were born.
“How was it with those ‘saints which slept and arose’ when Christ hung dead there in the dark? Were they not seen of many?”
“But that was a miracle.”
“They were risen dead, such as you and I shall be some day. The miracle consisted in their rising then and there. Moreover, did not the beggar recognize Abraham? and—Well, one might go through the Bible finding it full of this promise in hints or assertions, in parables or visions. We are ‘heirs of God,’ ‘joint heirs with Christ’; having suffered with Him, we shall be ‘glorified together.’ Christ himself has said many sure things: ‘I will come and receive you, that where I am, there ye may be.’ ‘I will that they be with me where I am.’ Using, too, the very type of Godhead to signify the eternal nearness and eternal love of just such as you and Roy as John and me, he prays: ‘Holy Father, keep them whom Thou hast given me, that they may be one as we are.’
“There is one place, though, where I find what I like better than all the rest; you remember that old cry wrung from the lips of the stricken king,—‘I shall go to him; but he will not return to me.’”
“I never thought before how simple and direct it is; and that, too, in those old blinded days.”