Beyond the balsam thicket, by another camp fire, the girl and the man sat talking, talking of the deed that had been done and the atonement demanded, and of the great future beyond this present life; the future that stretches away endlessly, the future of peace to some, perhaps to all, who knows? For there be some who think that this life has in it such forces of education, such enlightenment to the understanding, such quickening to the conscience, such ripening of character; and that through its experiences, its trials, and its griefs, come such graces to the souls of those that leave it, that when they pass they leave their worse self behind them, even as the germ leaves the shuck out of which it sprouted,—leaves the dull, clamp ground forever while it groweth up into the sunlight in which it finds perfection.
"Mary," said the man, "I have done with the past. My mind turns wholly toward the future. I see it as the shipwrecked sailor sees the land, which, if he can but reach, he will not only be beyond the storm that wrecks him, but beyond all storms forever. Companion of my joys and companion of my grief,—companion in everything but in my sin,—counsel with me, with your eyes turned ahead. You are innocent and innocence is prophetic. What lies beyond this world and the life men live in it? What of good waits for him who gives up this life bravely and penitently, and trusts himself to the decisions and the certainties of the great hereafter?"
"My master," said the girl, "it is not for me to teach you, you who are so much greater than I, you who have been gifted with faculties and powers that have lifted you above men. What can I say to you save to repeat what you have said to me?"
"Mary," he replied, "talk to me from out your heart and not from out your mind. The prophecies that come to men from Heaven, Heaven has communicated through the emotions of the just and the pure, and not through the perceptions. Tell me of the faith of your heart, the heart which I know has been free of guile. Tell me of the great Hereafter and what awaits me there."
"The Hereafter?" said the girl, and she lifted her eyes lovingly to the face of the man. "The Hereafter is the same as Here, only larger; as things grown are larger than things ungrown. The Future is to the Present what the river is to the stream, what the stream is to the fountain,—it is the flowing out and the flowing on,—the widening and the deepening of what is."
"Is there no gap, no breakage, no chasm or gulf between the Here and the Hereafter?" asked the man.
"No," said the girl, "there is no gap, nor chasm, nor gulf, but continuity of progress and perfect sequence. The connections between the Known and the Unknown are perfect. The one does not end and the other begin. Time is the beginning of eternity; and the brief time that men call a day is only a fraction of endlessness."
"There is no end to life, then?" queried the man.
"End to life!" exclaimed the girl. "How can life end? Life changes its form, its embodiment, the location of its residence; but life is the breath of God and when once breathed into the universe and it has taken form and made for itself expression, who may annihilate it? Who may take it out of existence? No, master, there is no end to life."
"It is a sublime faith," said the man, "and I have proclaimed it unto many; but few have been great enough to receive the doctrine as a verity. In theory they have received it; but their superstition has robbed them of its mighty consolations. But if we do not die, but only pass forward as men go out of a city's gate along a road that has no end, what fate befalls them? Does a change of nature come to them?"