“But these you can see, you can touch.” “What would be the use of having a body that you can’t see and touch? A body is a _body_, not a spirit. Why should you not, having seen Roy’s old smile and heard his own voice, clasp his hand again, and feel his kiss on your happy lips? “It is really amusing,” she continued, “to sum up the notions that good people--excellent people--even thinking people--have of the heavenly body. Vague visions of floating about in the clouds, of balancing--with a white robe on, perhaps--in stiff rows about a throne, like the angels in the old pictures, converging to an apex, or ranged in semi-circles like so many marbles. Murillo has one charming exception. I always take a secret delight in that little cherub of his, kicking the clouds, in the right-hand upper corner of the Immaculate Conception; he seems to be having a good time of it, in genuine baby-fashion. The truth is, that the ordinary idea, if sifted accurately, reduces our eternal personality to--_gas_. “Isaac Taylor holds, that, as far as the abstract idea of spirit is concerned, it may just as reasonably be granite as ether. “Mrs. Charles says a pretty thing about this. She thinks these ‘super-spiritualized angels’ very ‘unsatisfactory’ beings, and that ‘the heart returns with loving obstinacy to the young men in long white garments’ who sat waiting in the sepulchre. “Here again I cling to my conjecture about the word ‘angel’; for then we should learn emphatically something about our future selves. “‘As the angels in heaven,’ or ‘equal unto the angels,’ we are told in another place,--that may mean simply what it says. At least, if we are to resemble them in the particular respect of which the words were spoken,--and that one of the most important which could well be selected,--it is not unreasonable to infer that we shall resemble them in others. ‘In the Resurrection,’ by the way, means, in that connection and in many others, simply future state of existence, without any reference to the time at which the great bodily change is to come. “‘But this is a digression,’ as the novelists say. I was going to say, that it bewilders me to conjecture where students of the Bible have discovered the usual foggy nonsense about the corporeity of heaven. “If there is anything laid down in plain statement, devoid of metaphor or parable, simple and unequivocal, it is the definite contradiction of all that. Paul, in his preface to that sublime apostrophe to death, repeats and reiterates it, lest we should make a mistake in his meaning. “‘There are celestial _bodies_.’ ‘It is raised a spiritual _body_.’ ‘There is a spiritual _body_.’ ‘It _is_ raised in incorruption.’ ‘It _is_ raised in glory.’ ‘It _is_ raised in power.’ Moses, too, when he came to the transfigured mount in glory, had as real a _body_ as when he went into the lonely mount to die.” “But they will be different from these?”