“Prayer means to us, in this life, more often penitent confession than happy interchange of thought with Him. It is associated, too, with aching limbs and sleepy eyes, and nights when the lamp goes out. Obstacles, moral and physical, stand in the way of our knowing exactly what it may mean in the ideal of it. “My best conception of it lies in the _friendship_ of the man Christ Jesus. I suppose he will bear with him, eternally, the humanity which he took up with him from the Judean hills. I imagine that we shall see him in visible form like ourselves, among us, yet not of us; that he, himself, is “Gott mit ihnen”; that we shall talk with him as a man talketh with his friend. Perhaps, bowed and hushed at his dear feet, we shall hear from his own lips the story of Nazareth, of Bethany, of Golgotha, of the chilly mountains where he used to pray all night long for us; of the desert places where he hungered; of his cry for help--think, Mary--_His!_--when there was not one in all the world to hear it, and there was silence in heaven, while angels strengthened him and man forsook him. Perhaps his voice--the very voice which has sounded whispering through our troubled life--“Could ye not watch one hour?”--shall unfold its perplexed meanings; shall make its rough places plain; shall show us step by step the merciful way by which he led us to the hour; shall point out to us, joy by joy, the surprises that he has been planning for us, just as the old father in the story planned to surprise his wayward boy come home. “And such a ‘communion,’--which is not too much, nor yet enough, to dare to expect of a God who was the ‘friend’ of Abraham, who ‘walked’ with Enoch, who did not call fishermen his servants,--_such_ will be that ‘presence of God,’ that ‘adoration,’ on which we have looked from afar off with despairing eyes that wept, they were so dazzled, and turned themselves away as from the thing they greatly feared.” I think we neither of us cared to talk for a while after this. Something made me forget even that I was going to see Roy in heaven. “Three-and-thirty years. Three-and-thirty years.” The words rang themselves over. “It is on the humanity of Christ,” she said after some musing, “that all my other reasons for hoping for such a heaven as I hope for, rest for foundation. He knows exactly what we are, for he has been one of us; exactly what we hope and fear and crave, for he has hoped and feared and craved, not the less humanly, but only more intensely.