Love stories; New York (N.Y.) -- History -- 1775-1865 -- Fiction
"I shall marry no one. I will show you the better way. Few can walk in
it, but Doctor Roslyn says, he thinks it may be my part--my happy
part--to do so:" and as she spoke she took from the little pocket at
her side a small copy of the gospels, and it opened of its own account
at the twentieth chapter of St. Luke. "See!" she said, "and read it for
yourself, George--"
"The children of this world marry and are given in marriage. But they
which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the
resurrection from the dead, neither marry, nor are given in marriage.
"Neither can they die any more; for they are equal unto the angels, and
are the children of God, being the children of the resurrection."
[Footnote: St. Luke, chap. xx. 34-36.]
"To die no more! To be like unto the angels! To be the children of God!
This is the end and aim of my desires, to be among 'the children of
God!'"
"Dear Annie, I cannot understand this."
"Not yet. It is not your time. My soul, I think, is ages older than
yours. It takes ages of schooling to get into that class that may leave
Earth forever, and be as the angels. Even now I know, I am sure that
you are fretting and miserable for the love of some woman. For whose
love, George? Tell me."
Then Hyde plunged with headlong precipitancy into the story of his love
for Cornelia, and of the inexplicably cruel way in which it had been
brought to a close. "And yesterday," he continued with a sob in his
voice--"yesterday I heard that her father had taken her to
Philadelphia. I shall see her no more. He will marry her to Rem Van
Arenas, or to one of her Quaker cousins, and the taste is taken out of
my life, and I am only a walking misery."
"I do not believe it is Cornelia's fault."
"Here is her letter. Read it." Then Annie look the letter and after
reading it said, "If she be all you say, I will vow she wrote this in
her sleep. I should like to see her. Why do you think wrong of her?
What is love without faith in the one you love? Do you know first and
finally what true love is? It is THINKING kindly and nobly. For if we
GIVE all we have, and DO all we can do, and yet THINK unkindly, it
profits us nothing. Doctor Roslyn told me so. You remember him?"
"Your teacher?"
"My teacher, my friend, my father after the spirit. He told me that our
thoughts moulded our fate, because thought and life are one. So then,
if you really love Cornelia, you must think good of her, and then good
will come."
"If thought and life are one, Annie, if doing good, and giving good,
are nothing to thinking good, and we are to be judged by our quality of
thinking, there will be a greater score against all of us, than we can
imagine. I, for one, should not like to be brought face to face with
what I think, and have thought about people; it would be an accounting
beyond my power to settle."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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