I was perplexed by a good many matters besides. I had learned to keep most of my thoughts to myself, but I did venture to ask about the Ressurrection—how it was that those who had died and gone straight to heaven, and had been singing there for thousands of years, could have any use for the dust to which their bodies had returned. Were they not already as alive as they could be? I found that there were different ideas of the resurrection among "orthodox" people, even then. I was told however, that this was too deep a matter for me, and so I ceased asking questions. But I pondered the matter of death; what did it mean? The Apostle Paul gave me more light on the subject than any of the ministers did. And, as usual, a poem helped me. It was Pope's Ode, beginning with,—
"Vital spark of heavenly flame,"—
which I learned out of a reading-book. To die was to "languish into life." That was the meaning of it! and I loved to repeat to myself the words,—
"Hark! they whisper: angels say,
'Sister spirit, come away!'"
"The world recedes; it disappears!
Heaven opens on my eyes! my ears
With sounds seraphic ring."
A hymn that I learned a little later expressed to me the same satisfying thought:
"For strangers into life we come,
And dying is but going home."
The Apostle's words, with which the song of "The Dying Christian to his Soul" ends, left the whole cloudy question lit up with sunshine, to my childish thoughts:—
"O grave, where is thy 'victory?
O death, where is thy sting?"
My father was dead; but that only meant that he had gone to a better home than the one be lived in with us, and by and by we should go home, too.