The loves, the fears, the
frailties that are born with the flesh, with the flesh they shall die. Let
them die! There is that in man that cannot die--a seed, a germ an embryo,
a spiritual essence. Higher than she was on earth, as the tree is higher
than the seed, the man than the embryo, so shall you behold her; changed,
glorified!"
High words, ringing well; they are the offering of jewels to the hungry, of
gold to the man who dies for bread. Bread is corruptible, gold is
incorruptible; bread is light, gold is heavy; bread is common, gold is
rare; but the hungry man will barter all your mines for one morsel of
bread. Around God's throne there may be choirs and companies of angels,
cherubim and seraphim, rising tier above tier, but not for one of them all
does the soul cry aloud. Only perhaps for a little human woman full of
sin, that it once loved.
"Change is death, change is death!" he cried. "I want no angel, only she;
no holier and no better, with all her sins upon her, so give her me or give
me nothing!"
And, truly, does not the heart love its own with the strongest passion for
their very frailties? Heaven might keep its angels if men were but left to
men.
"Change is death," he cried, "change is death! Who dares to say the body
never dies, because it turns again to grass and flowers? And yet they dare
to say the spirit never dies, because in space some strange unearthly being
may have sprung up upon its ruins.
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