The Gates Ajar

by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

I asked her if she inferred from that, that we should have just such bodies as the freedom from pain and sin would make of these.

“Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom,” she said. “There is no escaping that, even if I had the smallest desire to escape it, which I have not. Whatever is essentially earthly and temporary in the arrangements of this world will be out of place and unnecessary there. Earthly and temporary, flesh and blood certainly are.”

“Christ said, ‘A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.’”

“A spirit hath not; and who ever said that it did? His body had something that appeared like them, certainly. That passage, by the way, has led some ingenious writer on the Chemistry of Heaven to infer that our bodies there will be like these, minus blood! I don’t propose to spend my time over such investigations. Summing up the meaning of the story of those last days before the Ascension, and granting the shade of mystery which hangs over them, I gather this,—that the spiritual body is real, is tangible, is visible, is human, but that ‘we shall be changed.’ Some indefinable but thorough change had come over Him. He could withdraw Himself from the recognition of Mary, and from the disciples, whose ‘eyes were holden,’ as it pleased Him. He came and went through barred and bolted doors. He appeared suddenly in a certain place, without sound of footstep or flutter of garment to announce His approach. He vanished, and was not, like a cloud. New and wonderful powers had been given to Him, of which, probably, His little bewildered group of friends saw but a few illustrations.”

“And He was yet man?”

“He was Jesus of Nazareth until the sorrowful drama of human life that He had taken upon Himself was thoroughly finished, from manger to sepulchre, and from sepulchre to the right hand of His Father.”

“I like to wonder,” she said, presently, “what we are going to look like and be like. Ourselves, in the first place. ‘It is I Myself,’ Christ said. Then to be perfectly well, never a sense of pain or weakness,—imagine how much solid comfort, if one had no other, in being forever rid of all the ills that flesh is heir to! Beautiful, too, I suppose we shall be, every one. Have you never had that come over you, with a thrill of compassionate thankfulness, when you have seen a poor girl shrinking, as only girls can shrink, under the life-long affliction of a marred face or form? The loss or presence of beauty is not as slight a deprivation or blessing as the moralists would make it out. Your grandmother, who was the most beautiful woman I ever saw, the belle of the county all her young days, and the model for artists’ fancy sketching even in her old ones, as modest as a violet and as honest as the sunshine, used to have the prettiest little way when we girls were in our teens, and she thought that we must be lectured a bit on youthful vanity, of adding, in her quiet voice, smoothing down her black silk apron as she spoke, ‘But still it is a thing to be thankful for, my dear, to have a comely countenance.’

“But to return to the track and our future bodies. We shall find them vastly convenient, undoubtedly, with powers of which there is no dreaming. Perhaps they will be so one with the soul that to will will be to do,—hindrance out of the question. I, for instance, sitting here by you, and thinking that I should like to be in Kansas, would be there. There is an interesting bit of a hint in Daniel about Gabriel, who, ‘being caused to fly swiftly, touched him about the time of the evening oblation.’”

“But do you not make a very material kind of heaven out of such suppositions?”

“It depends upon what you mean by ‘material.’ The term does not, to my thinking, imply degradation, except so far as it is associated with sin. Dr. Chalmers has the right of it, when he talks about ‘spiritual materialism.’ He says in his sermon on the New Heavens and Earth,—which, by the way, you should read, and from which I wish a few more of our preachers would learn something,—that we ‘forget that on the birth of materialism, when it stood out in the freshness of those glories which the great Architect of Nature had impressed upon it, that then the “morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy.”’ I do not believe in a gross heaven, but I believe in a reasonable one.”