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 hasn’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,—which shall shake his cold, smooth theorizing 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 the mood, I made her take off her things and devote herself to me. My question concerned what we call the “intermediate state.”