Page:Resurrection Rock (1920).pdf/181

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A LETTER FROM LONDON
169

thought, but they did not correspond to what was reasonable and modern; many were only legendary or meant to be taken figuratively. She thought of Christ's miracles as figurative, when she thought about them at all; and, though every time she went to church and repeated the Creed she spoke her belief in the resurrection, she had not truly believed in it. She had thought that many of the apostles and others might honestly have believed that they saw Christ after he was dead; but they had done it subjectively as the ultra-modern school of psychology was teaching. To think of a person as actually surviving death in his own personality seemed to Ethel to be believing in ghosts; and no one, of sound mind and nerves, believed in ghosts; they always proved, when thoroughly investigated, to be something quite simple and silly.

Her father's death had not changed this thought but had only served to make her want to believe more firmly in heaven and to think of him as there. But she did not analyze how she came first by the ideas which pictured heaven for her. She just thought of it, naturally, in bright colors of blue and gold and white as the old Sunday-school cards always showed it and as it was described in the hymns which she sang:

Jerusalem, the golden!
With milk and honey blest . . .
What joys await us there!
What radiancy of glory!
What bliss beyond compare!

They stand, those halls of Zion,
All jubilant with song,
And bright with many an angel,
And all the martyr throng.