“I fancy many things about it; but of course can feel sure of only the foundation principle. This life is a great school-house. The wise Teacher trains in us such gifts as, if we graduate honorably, will be of most service in the perfect manhood and womanhood that come after. He sees, as we do not, that a power is sometimes best trained by repression. ‘We do not always lose an advantage when we dispense with it,’ Goethe says. But the suffocated lives, like little Clo’s there, make my heart ache sometimes. I take comfort in thinking how they will bud and blossom up in the air, by and by. There are a great many of them. We tread them underfoot in our careless stepping now and then, and do not see that they have not the elasticity to rise from our touch. ‘Heaven may be a place for those who failed on earth,’ the Country Parson says.” “Then there will be air enough for all?” “For all; for those who have had a little bloom in this world, as well. I suppose the artist will paint his pictures, the poet sing his happy songs, the orator and author will not find their talents hidden in the eternal darkness of a grave; the sculptor will use his beautiful gift in the moulding of some heavenly Carrara; ‘as well the singer as the player on instruments shall be there.’ Christ said a thing that has grown on me with new meanings lately:--‘He that _loseth his life for my sake shall find it_.’ _It_, you see,--not another man’s life, not a strange compound of powers and pleasures, but his own familiar aspirations. So we shall best ‘glorify God,’ not less there than here, by doing it in the peculiar way that He himself marked out for us. But--ah, Mary, you see it is only the life ‘lost’ for His sake that shall be so beautifully found. A great man never goes to heaven because he is great. He must go, as the meanest of his fellow-sinners go, with face towards Calvary, and every golden treasure used for love of Him who showed him how.” “What would the old Pagans--and modern ones, too, for that matter--say to that? Wasn’t it Tacitus who announced it as his belief, that immortality was granted as a special gift to a few superior minds? For the people who persisted in making up the rest of the world, poor things! as it could be of little consequence what became of them, they might die as the brute dieth.”