“‘_If it were not so_,’--do you take in the thoughtful tenderness of that? A mother, stilling her frightened child in the dark, might speak just so,--‘_if it were not so, I would have told you_.’ That brooding love makes room for all that we can want. He has sounded every deep of a troubled and tempted life. Who so sure as he to understand how to prepare a place where troubled and tempted lives may grow serene? Further than this; since he stands as our great Type, no less in death and after than before it, he answers for us many of these lesser questions on the event of which so much of our happiness depends. “Shall we lose our personality in a vague ocean of ether,--you one puff of gas, I another?-- “He, with his own wounded body, rose and ate and walked and talked. “Is all memory of this life to be swept away?-- “He, arisen, has forgotten nothing. He waits to meet his disciples at the old, familiar places; as naturally as if he had never been parted from them, he falls in with the current of their thoughts. “Has any one troubled us with fears that in the glorified crowds of heaven we may miss a face dearer than all the world to us?-- “He made himself known to his friends; Mary, and the two at Emmaus, and the bewildered group praying and perplexed in their bolted room. “Do we weary ourselves with speculations whether human loves can outlive the shock of death?-- “Mary knew how He loved her, when, turning, she heard him call her by her name. They knew, whose hearts ‘burned within them while he talked with them by the way, and when he tarried with them, the day being far spent.’” “And for the rest?” “For the rest, about which He was silent, we can trust him, and if, trusting, we please ourselves with fancies, he would be the last to think it blame to us. There is one promise which grows upon me the more I study it, ‘He that spared not his own Son, how shall he not also _with him freely give us all things_?’ Sometimes I wonder if that does not infold a beautiful _double entendre_, a hint of much that you and I have conjectured,--as one throws down a hint of a surprise to a child. “Then there is that pledge to those who seek first His kingdom: ‘_All these things shall be added unto you_.’ ‘These things,’ were food and clothing, were varieties of material delight, and the words were spoken to men who lived hungry, beggared, and died the death of outcasts. If this passage could be taken literally, it would be very significant in its bearing on the future life; for Christ must keep his promise to the letter, in one world or another. It may be wrenching the verse, not as a verse, but from the grain of the argument, to insist on the literal interpretation,--though I am not sure.” XIV. August 15. I asked the other day, wondering whether all ministers were like Dr. Bland, what Uncle Forceythe used to believe about heaven.