CHAPTER VIII. DO THEY KNOW ONE ANOTHER IN HEAVEN? ANY a time the question has been asked MANY Shall we know one another in heaven? Volumes have been written upon it. Scarcely any one but has had his and her thoughts about it. Specially, it may be safely said that no one who has friends in heaven but has many a time anxiously inquired - Shall I know them again when I get there? Shall the mother know her child, the child she bore and nursed and lost, over whose coffin she wept so inconsolably, by whose lonely grave she sits? Or shall she and it be strangers to each other in heaven, both there, yet neither recognising the other? Shall the children know their mother, or shall all the loving intercourse of earth be a thing for gotten and never to be renewed? Is all friendship to end at death, to pass away as a thing of the earth earthy? The great men of other days, the Abrahams and the Davids and the Isaiahs, the Johns and the Pauls and the Peters, the Polycarps and the Augustines and the Chrysostoms, the Luthers and Calvins and Knoxes-shall we meet and know them in heaven, or shall we not? To say that those questions are interesting, is to say little. They are questions which we must get answered. We cannot form any clear notion of the society of the blest until we have them resolved. In a recently published volume of poems the burning pressure of such questions is well put. A little girl has lost her mother, lost her when that mother was herself little more than a girl. She asks with trembling earnestness,― "Shall you know me, mother, mother, when I come to you in heaven, When I come to seek our hidden, sweet, lost saint of twenty-seven ; When at last my griefs are ended, when at last my sorrows cease; When at last slow Death's reluctant hand is laid on me in peace ? Shall you know your child again among the happy hosts of heaven, Know the child you bore and loved and left when you were twenty-seven?" She does not doubt that she will find her mother, "My thirst for you will lead me, my orphanhood will guide." But will the mother know her child again,that is the maddening thought, the child whose eyes have grown heavy with the burden of years, whose heart has grown bitter with the baptism of tears? "Shall you not be blinded, mother, by your blessedness of heaven; By your youth, by all your joy, by all your strength of twenty-seven?" She wonders if her mother will understand her when she falls about her feet and clasps them, lest her arms should be too sweet; and then most pleadingly, like a child holding up its tearful face to be kissed, she asks,— "Shall you take me, shall you raise me slowly, sweetly, to your heart; Make me once again your very child-not outcast and apart; |