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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 28

February 26th

page 8

Death and heaven could not seem very different to a Pagan from what they seem to me. I say this deliberately. It has been deliberately forced upon me. That of which I had a faint consciousness in the first shock takes shape now. I do not see how one with such thoughts in her heart as I have had can possibly be "regenerate," or stand any chance of ever becoming "one of the redeemed." And here I am, what I have been for six years, a member of an Evangelical church, in good and regular standing!

The bare, blank sense of physical repulsion from death, which was all the idea I had of anything when they first brought him home, has not gone yet. It is horrible. It was cruel. Roy, all I had in the wide world,—Roy, with the flash in his eyes, with his smile that lighted the house all up; with his pretty, soft hair that I used to curl and kiss about my finger, his bounding step, his strong arras that folded me in and cared for me,—Roy snatched away in an instant by a dreadful God, and laid out there in the wet and snow, in the hideous wet and snow,—never to kiss him, never to see him any more!

He was a good boy. Roy was a good boy. He must have gone to heaven. But I know nothing about heaven. It is very far off. In my best and happiest days, I never liked to think of it. If I were to go there it could do me no good, for I should not see Roy. Or if by chance I should see him standing up among the grand, white angels, he would not be the old dear Roy. I should grow so tired of singing! Should long and fret for one little talk,—for I never said good-bye, and——

I will stop this.

A scrap from the German of Bürger, which I came across to-day shall be copied here.

"Be calm, my child, forget thy woe,
And think of God and heaven;
Christ thy Redeemer hath to thee
Himself for comfort given.

"O mother, mother, what is heaven?
O mother, what is hell?
To be with Wilhelm,—that's my heaven;
Without him,—that's my hell."