Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/335

Rh not only one, as did the Egyptian, but all dead. The rich are as poor as the poorest, perhaps poorer, in their dreams; the poor rich as the richest, perhaps the richer in their dreams. The whole life wiped out, and as though it had never been. Ah, if only that unconsciousness could come after death, which some so anxiously seek to detect in the Word of God, but detect it not—an everlasting sleep—it would be a relief to the sinner! But it is not the revealed will of God thus to give relief to the sinner. He must dwell in his own consciousness. He that is filthy shall be filthy still. The lustful, the revengeful, the miserly, he shall still be possessed of his own passions. The saintly wife sleeping by the sinful husband may know no difference in this unconscious state; but the first breath of the awakening morn reveals to each no more clearly their existence than it does their character. The saintly one is still saintly, the sinful, sinful. The first thought of one is a prayer, of the second, an oath. Before the lips are awakened the mind is, and the heart, and out of their abundance the mouth speaks. So will the slumber of the grave be broken.

Eternity is not a sleep of the righteous or of the wicked, nor is it the sleep of one and not of the other. They are alike in their consciousness, as at the beginning; alike in their free choice; alike in their corresponding liberty of action; alike in their inward constitution; alike forever in heaven, forever in hell.

A mile or more up, and we enter a little suburb, whose church, perched on a scarfed cliff, looks down the gorge into the city, and out far away into the valleys that open on Leon and Queretaro. How apt in location of their churches this Church ever is, apt for effect, not always for utility! Here they combine, and the centre of the hamlet is the key of the landscape.

Still up we go, meeting at this gray hour the descending laborers. Who is this coming forth to meet us, with his coffin on his back, or the coffin of some Goliath of the mountains? It towers a yard above his head, and goes down his back to within a foot of his heels. If my fears had not pretty nearly given out by lack of any success in the employment of them (every attempt having