Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/183

 "And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose,

"And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many."

That was from the New Testament, somewhere. Ethel opened her Bible and found the passage in the Gospel of St. Matthew. Yes; the Bible itself, when you thought about it, suggested a very different sort of state from the heaven of the hymn book and the Sunday-school cards. She thought of things which St. Paul said—she always had liked Paul best as the finest and most human of the writers of the Bible; yet she had not taken literally what even he had said about the communion of saints and the spiritual body. She turned to his epistles and read a few familiar passages. What did Paul really mean?

Her father, who must be in heaven—whatever heaven actually was—wished her to see a James Quinlan of Chicago, and her father was concerned about it; she was to tell James Quinlan that not only her father but "Robert" said to do "it",—evidently something which James Quinlan was known to be quite disinclined to do. So she was to assure him that he would be happy when he had done it and that the cost "there"—that is, here in this world—was nothing.

Nothing compared to what? The reward in the next world?

She wondered why her father, having succeeded in saying so much, could not have told her more. Her father had wished to do something and had found it very difficult. Were the inhabitants of heaven, then, still in some sense finite as they still were not completely "from care released."

She longed to talk out these speculations and ob-