“You see it could not be otherwise,” she went on, speaking low. “Where would you be, or I, or they who seem to us so much dearer and better than ourselves, if it were not for Jesus Christ? What can heaven be to us, but a song of the love that is the same to us yesterday, to-day, and forever,--that, in the mystery of an intensity which we shall perhaps never understand, could choose death and be glad in the choosing, and, what is more than that, could live _life_ for us for three-and-thirty years? “I cannot strain my faith--or rather my common sense--to the rhapsodies with which many people fill heaven. But it seems to me like this: A friend goes away from us, and it may be seas or worlds that lie between us, and we love him. He leaves behind him his little keepsakes; a lock of hair to curl about our fingers; a picture that has caught the trick of his eyes or smile; a book, a flower, a letter. What we do with the curling hair, what we say to the picture, what we dream over the flower and the letter, nobody knows but ourselves. People have risked life for such mementoes. Yet who loves the senseless gift more than the giver,--the curl more than the young forehead on which it fell,--the letter more than the hand which traced it? “So it seems to me that we shall learn to see in God the centre of all possibilities of joy. The greatest of these lesser delights is but the greater measure of His friendship. They will not mean less of pleasure, but more of Him. They will not “pale,” as Dr. Bland would say. Human dearness will wax, not wane, in heaven; but human friends will be loved for love of Him.” “I see; that helps me; like a torch in a dark room. But there will be shadows in the corners. Do you suppose that we shall ever _fully_ feel it in the body?” “In the body, probably not. We see through a glass so darkly that the temptation to idolatry is always our greatest. Golden images did not die with Paganism. At times I fancy that, somewhere between this world and another, a revelation will come upon us like a flash, of what _sin_ really is,--such a revelation, lighting up the lurid background of our past in such colors, that the consciousness of what Christ has done for us will be for a time as much as heart can bear. After that, the mystery will be, not how to love Him most, but that we ever _could_ have loved any creature or thing as much.” “We serve God quite as much by active work as by special prayer, here,” I said after some thought; “how will it be there?” “We must be busily at work certainly; but I think there must naturally be more communion with Him then. Now, this phrase “communion with God” has been worn, and not always well worn.