mmunicated. You may
speculate and argue and guess as much as you like, but that does not
thin the darkness one bit. The unborn child has no more faculty or
opportunity for knowing what the life upon earth is like than man here,
in the world, has for knowing that life beyond. The chrysalis' dreams
about what it would be when it was a butterfly would be as reliable as a
man's imagination of what a future life will be.

So let us feel two things:--Let us be thankful that we do not know, for
the ignorance is the sign of the greatness; and then, let us be sure
that just the very mixture of knowledge and ignorance which we have
about another world is precisely the food which is most fitted to
nourish imagination and hope. If we had more knowledge, supposing it
could be given, of the conditions of that future life, it would lose
some of its power to attract. Ignorance does not always prevent the
occupation of the mind with a subject. Blank ignorance does; but
ignorance, shot with knowledge like a tissue which, when you hold it one
way seems all black, and when you tilt it another, seems golden,
stimulates desire, hope, and imagination. So let us thankfully acquiesce
in the limited knowledge.

Fools can ask questions which wise men cannot answer, and will not ask.
There are questions which, sometimes, when we are thinking about our own
future, and sometimes when we see dear ones go away into the mist,
become to us almost torture. It is easy to put them; it is not so easy
to say: 'Thank God, we cannot answer them yet!' If we could it would
only be because the experience of earth was adequate to measure the
experience of Heaven; and that would be to bring the future down to the
low levels of this present. Let us be thankful then that so long as we
can only speak in language derived from the experiences of earth, we
have yet to learn the vocabulary of Heaven. Let us be thankful that our
best help to know what we shall be is to reverse much of what we are,
and that the loftiest and most positive declarations concerning the
future lie in negatives like these:--'I saw no temple therein.' 'There
shall be no night there.' 'There shall be no curse there.' 'There shall
be no more sighing nor weeping, for the former things are passed away.'

The white mountains keep their secret well; not until we have passed
through the black rocks that make the throat of the pass on the summit,
shall we see the broad and shining plains beyond the hill