“They were risen dead, such as you and I shall be some day. The miracle consisted in their rising then and there. Moreover, did not the beggar recognize Abraham? and--Well, one might go through the Bible finding it full of this promise in hints or assertions, in parables or visions. We are ‘heirs of God,’ ‘joint heirs with Christ’; having suffered with Him, we shall be ‘glorified _together_.’ Christ himself has said many sure things: ‘I will come and receive you, that where I am, there ye may be.’ ‘I will that they be with me where I am.’ Using, too, the very type of Godhead to signify the eternal nearness and eternal love of just such as you and Roy as John and me, he prays: ‘Holy Father, keep them whom Thou hast given me, that _they may be one as we are_.’ “There is one place, though, where I find what I like better than all the rest; you remember that old cry wrung from the lips of the stricken king,--‘I shall go to him; but he will not return to me.’” “I never thought before how simple and direct it is; and that, too, in those old blinded days.” “The more I study the Bible,” she said, “and I study not entirely in ignorance of the commentators and the mysteries, the more perplexed I am to imagine where the current ideas of our future come from. They certainly are not in this book of gracious promises. That heaven which we heard about to-day was Dr. Bland’s, not God’s. ‘It’s aye a wonderfu’ thing to me,’ as poor Lauderdale said, ‘the way some preachers take it upon themselves to explain matters to the Almighty!’” “But the harps and choirs, the throne, the white robes, are all in Revelation. Deacon Quirk would put his great brown finger on the verses, and hold you there triumphantly.” “Can’t people tell picture from substance, a metaphor from its meaning? That book of Revelation is precisely what it professes to be,--a vision; a symbol. A symbol of something, to be sure, and rich with pleasant hopes, but still a symbol. Now, I really believe that a large proportion of Christian church-members, who have studied their Bible, attended Sabbath schools, listened to sermons all their lives, if you could fairly come at their most definite idea of the place where they expect to spend eternity, would own it to be the golden city, with pearl gates, and jewels in the wall. It never occurs to them, that, if one picture is literal, another must be. If we are to walk golden streets, how can we stand on a sea of glass? How can we ‘sit on thrones’? How can untold millions of us ‘lie in Abraham’s bosom’? “But why have given us empty symbols? Why not a little fact?”