I pause, without writing ‘everlasting,’ as perhaps you expected. Neither Carpaccio nor I know anything about Duration of life, or what the word translated ‘everlasting’ means. Nay, the first sign of noble trust in God and man, is to be able to act without any such hope. All the heroic deeds, all the purely unselfish passions of our existence, depend on our being able to live, if need be, through the Shadow of Death: and the daily heroism of simply brave men consists in fronting and accepting Death as such, trusting that what their Maker decrees for them shall be well. But what Carpaccio knows, and what I know also, are precisely the things which your wiseacre apothecaries, and their apprentices, and too often your wiseacre rectors and vicars, and their apprentices, tell you that you can’t know, because “eye hath not seen nor ear heard them,” the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. But God has revealed them to us,—to Carpaccio, and Angelico, and Dante, and Giotto, and Filippo Lippi, and Sandro Botticelli, and me, and to every child that has been taught to know its Father in heaven,—by the Spirit: because we have minded, or do mind, the things of the Spirit in some measure, and in such measure have entered into our rest. “The things which God hath prepared for them that love Him.” Hereafter, and up there, above the clouds, you have been taught to think;—until you were informed by your land-surveyors that there was neither up nor down; but only an axis of x and an axis of y; and by aspiring aeronauts that there was nothing in the blue but damp and azote. And now you don’t believe these things are prepared anywhere? They are prepared just as much as ever, when and where they used to be: just now, and here, close at your hand. All things are prepared,—come ye to the marriage. Up and down on the old highways which your fathers trod, and under the hedges of virgin’s bower and wild rose which your fathers planted, there are the messengers crying to you to come. Nay, at your very doors, though one is just like the other in your model lodging houses,—there is One knocking, if you would open, with something better than tracts in His basket;—supper, and very material supper, if you will only condescend to eat of angel’s food first. There are meats for the belly, and the belly for meats; doth not your Father know that ye have need of these things? But if you make your belly your only love, and your meats your only masters, God shall destroy both it and them.