“I am afraid that he will lose one of them then, before many more years of his life are past.” “What! he hasn’t been telling you that they are consumptive or anything of the sort?” “O dear me, no,” with a merry laugh which died quickly away: “I was only thinking,--there is trouble in store for him; some intense pain,--if he is capable of intense pain,--which shall shake his cold, smooth theorizing to the foundation. He speaks a foreign tongue when he talks of bereavement, of death, of the future life. No argument could convince him of that, though, which is the worst of it.” “He must think you shockingly heterodox.” “I don’t doubt it. We had a little talk this morning, and he regarded me with an expression of mingled consternation and perplexity that was curious. He is a very good man. He is not a stupid man. I only wish that he would stop preaching and teaching things that he knows nothing about. “He is only drifting with the tide, though,” she added, “in his views of this matter. In our recoil from the materialism of the Romish Church, we have, it seems to me, nearly stranded ourselves on the opposite shore. Just as, in a rebound from the spirit which would put our Saviour on a level with Buddha or Mahomet, we have been in danger of forgetting ‘to begin as the Bible begins,’ with his humanity. It is the grandeur of inspiration, that it knows how to _balance_ truth.” It had been in my mind for several days to ask Aunt Winifred something, and, feeling in the mood, I made her take off her things and devote herself to me. My question concerned what we call the “intermediate state.” “I have been expecting that,” she said; “what about it?” “What _is_ it?” “Life and activity.” “We do not go to sleep, of course.” “I believe that notion is about exploded, though clear thinkers like Whately have appeared to advocate it. Where it originated, I do not know, unless from the frequent comparisons in the Scriptures of death with sleep, which refer solely, I am convinced, to the condition of body, and which are voted down by an overwhelming majority of decided statements relative to the consciousness, happiness, and tangibility of the life into which we immediately pass.” “It is intermediate, in some sense, I suppose.” “It waits between two other conditions,--yes; I think the drift of what we are taught about it leads to that conclusion. I expect to become at once sinless, but to have a broader Christian character many years hence; to be happy at once, but to be happier by and by; to find in myself wonderful new tastes and capacities, which are to be immeasurably ennobled and enlarged after the Resurrection, whatever that may mean.” “What does it mean?” “I know no more than you, but you shall hear what I think, presently. I was going to say that this seems to be plain enough in the Bible. The angels took Lazarus at once to Abraham. Dives seems to have found no interval between death and consciousness of suffering.”