will look in many faces, but never to recognize old friends and lovers!  A fine saviour of men is their Jesus!  Glorious lights they shine in the world of our sorrow, holding forth a word of darkness, of dismallest death!  Is the Lord such as they believe him?  ‘Good-bye, then, good Master!’ cries the human heart.  ’I thought thou couldst save me, but, alas, thou canst not.  If thou savest the part of our being which can sin, thou lettest the part that can love sink into hopeless perdition:  thou art not he that should come; I look for another!  Thou wouldst destroy and not save me!  Thy father is not my father; thy God is not my God!  Ah, to whom shall we go?  He has not the words of eternal life, this Jesus, and the universe is dark as chaos!  O father, this thy son is good, but we need a greater son than he.  Never will thy children love thee under the shadow of this new law, that they are not to love one another as thou lovest them!’ How does that man love God—­of what kind is the love he bears him—­who is unable to believe that God loves every throb of every human heart toward another?  Did not the Lord die that we should love one another, and be one with him and the Father, and is not the knowledge of difference essential to the deepest love?  Can there be oneness without difference? harmony without distinction?  Are all to have the same face? then why faces at all?  If the plains of heaven are to be crowded with the same one face over and over for ever, but one moment will pass ere by monotony bliss shall have grown ghastly.  Why not perfect spheres of featureless ivory rather than those multitudinous heads with one face!  Or are we to start afresh with countenances all new, each beautiful, each lovable, each a revelation of the infinite father, each distinct from every other, and therefore all blending toward a full revealing—­but never more the dear old precious faces, with its whole story in each, which seem, at the very thought of them, to draw our hearts out of our bosoms?  Were they created only to become dear, and be destroyed?  Is it in wine only that the old is better?  Would such a new heaven be a thing to thank God for?  Would this be a prospect on which the Son of Man would congratulate the mourner, or at which the mourner for the dead would count himself blessed?  It is a shame that such a preposterous, monstrous unbelief should call for argument.

A heaven without human love it were inhuman, and yet more undivine to desire; it ought not to be desired by any being made in the image of God.  The lord of life died that his father’s children might grow perfect in love—­might love their brothers and sisters as he loved them:  is it to this end that they must cease to know one another?  To annihilate the past of our earthly embodiment, would be to crush under the heel of an iron fate the very idea of tenderness, human or divine.