“What do you suppose people will do in heaven?” she asked again.
“Glorify God,” said the Deacon, promptly recovering himself,—“glorify God, and sing Worthy the Lamb! We shall be clothed in white robes with palms in our hands, and bow before the Great White Throne. We shall be engaged in such employments as befit sinless creatures in a spiritooal state of existence.”
“Now, Deacon Quirk,” replied Aunt Winifred, looking him over from head to foot,—old straw hat, calico shirt, blue overalls, and cow-hide boots, coarse, work-worn hands, and “narrow forehead braided tight,”—“just imagine yourself, will you? taken out of this life this minute, as you stand here in your potato-field (the Deacon changed his position with evident uneasiness), and put into another life,—not anybody else, but yourself, just as you left this spot,—and do you honestly think that you should be happy to go and put on a white dress and stand still in a choir with a green branch in one hand and a singing-book in the other, and sing and pray and never do anything but sing and pray, this year, next year, and every year forever?”
“We-ell,” he replied, surprised into a momentary flash of carnal candor, “I can’t say that I shouldn’t wonder for a minute, maybe, how Abinadab would ever get those potatoes hoed without me.—Abinadab! go back to your work!”
The graceful Abinadab had sauntered up during the conversation, and was listening, hoe in hand and mouth open. He slunk away when his father spoke, but came up again presently on tiptoe when Aunt Winifred was talking. There was an interested, intelligent look about his square and pitifully embarrassed face, which attracted my notice.
“But then,” proceeded the Deacon, re-enforced by the sudden recollection of his duties as a father and a church-member, “that couldn’t be a permanent state of feeling, you know. I expect to be transformed by the renewing of my mind to appreciate the glories of the New Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God. That’s what I expect, marm. Now I heerd that you told Mrs. Bland, or that Mary told her, or that she heerd it someway, that you said you supposed there were trees and flowers and houses and such in heaven. I told my wife I thought your deceased husband was a Congregational minister, and I didn’t believe you ever said it; but that’s the rumor.”
Without deeming it necessary to refer to her “deceased husband,” Aunt Winifred replied that “rumor” was quite right.
“Well!” said the Deacon, with severe significance, “I believe in a spiritooal heaven.”
I looked him over again,—hat, hoe, shirt, and all; scanned his obstinate old face with its stupid, good eyes and animal mouth. Then I glanced at Aunt Winifred as she leaned forward in the afternoon light; the white, finely cut woman, with her serene smile and rapt, saintly eyes,—every inch of her, body and soul, refined not only by birth and training, but by the long nearness of her heart to Christ.
“Of the earth, earthy. Of the heavens, heavenly.” The two faces sharpened themselves into two types. Which, indeed, was the better able to comprehend a “spiritooal heaven”?