IV.
Then a new time comes, of which the leading feature is, that the shrewd
questions are asked louder. We carry them to the grown-up people; they
answer us, and we are not satisfied.
And now between us and the dear old world of the senses the spirit-world
begins to peep in, and wholly clouds it over. What are the flowers to us?
They are fuel waiting for the great burning. We look at the walls of the
farmhouse and the matter-of-fact sheep-kraals, with the merry sunshine
playing over all; and do not see it. But we see a great white throne, and
him that sits on it. Around Him stand a great multitude that no man can
number, harpers harping with their harps, a thousand times ten thousand,
and thousands of thousands. How white are their robes, washed in the blood
of the Lamb! And the music rises higher, and rends the vault of heaven
with its unutterable sweetness. And we, as we listen, ever and anon, as it
sinks on the sweetest, lowest note, hear a groan of the damned from below.
We shudder in the sunlight.
"The torment," says Jeremy Taylor, whose sermons our father reads aloud in
the evening, "comprises as many torments as the body of man has joints,
sinews, arteries, etc., being caused by that penetrating and real fire of
which this temporal fire is but a painted fire. What comparison will there
be between burning for a hundred years' space and to be burning without
intermission as long as God is God!"
We remember the sermon there in the sunlight.
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