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 would not let me “die out.” More or less of 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 semi-circles 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 the Immaculate Conception; he seems to be 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 future state of existence, without any reference 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.