Part 8 (1/2)

As he walked away he said, ”Oh, I wish I had asked another question instead of that!”

”Well,” said I, ”what? Perhaps I will answer that one”

Turning back, he said eagerly, ”Will our good friend answer all o into the sky?”

I said, ”Yes, every one; for he knows everything, and can never be tired”

The expression of complete satisfaction hich he went away from me was most expressive

You will observe his expression of ”when I go into the sky,” and consider it together with the words that he interpolated saying, ”I have a good friend up in the sky,” in repeating to Mrs Doyle that first ave hioodness, and love, had a sky full of goodness The sky is the natural symbol of the unbounded and infinite and the essentially spiritual, and the conception of God into which I had led hiood friend, pervaded all space

The subsequent questions of how God looked, and upon His whereabouts, and the conversation on this, by identifying Him with the Love that he felt within himself, had revealed to him _Immortality_ before he had defined mortality

The God he felt within him in his conscious Love and without hiave him assurance that he would be sometime wherever God was I have lost the connection and place in the narrative of another conversation I had with hihts were in his head, and his feelings were in his boso in my lap close to a table, with his feet bare, and I put my hand under the table and pinched his toe He said:--

”What are you pinching my toe for?”

I said, ”How do you know I pinched your toe? you cannot see what I a under the table”

”I think you pinched hts were in your head, and all your feelings in your bosos are all overran right into ht”

”So you see,” said I, ”that you live all over your body and in any part of it, just as your Heavenly Father lives all over the world and in everything at once”

”Yes,” said he, ”I did not kno that was before”

The date of this conversation was so of our intercourse, as I know from the use of the word _Heavenly Father_, which caood friend_, and it was preceded by so with expressions of love to , he would embracegiven?” (an apple perhaps, or whatever it ht be) He would always say, ”You, you” Once he said, ”I love you more than all the apples in the world” Once when he was kissing my hand, I said, ”Which do you love best, me or my hand?”

”I love both,” he said

I persisted, and said, ”Supposing my hand was cut off, would you love reat deal etically; ”for it would hurt you so to have your poor hand cut off Would it not hurt you dreadfully?”

”I suppose it would, but by and by it would get well and what I want to know is, whether you would love me as ithout my hand as with it?”

He still declared he should love me more I then said, ”So you see s the Heavenly Father gave ave me my feet to ith, and eyes to see with; but ue are not me; and if I should lose them all, still I would be all of myself, and you could love me?”

”Yes,” said he; ”but I don't want you to lose any of those things, for I love theether”

My object in these conversations was to see if he would separate in thought the finite material body from the conscious soul or _himself_, as I preferred to say, for to speak of one's self as a _soul_ makes what is essentially subjective as objective as we desire to make the body, the use of which is to reveal to others the feelings and thoughts of the individual that otherwise the finite apprehension could not seize I was endeavoring to prepare him to minister to his mother, when I could persuade her to let hi that crisis of life as a step onward into the deep consciousness of immortality, which I believed would lift her out of the abyss into which her own consciousness seemed to fall at the utterance of the word, in spite of all the intellectual views of immortality which she had for ency, when she felt herself on the brink of the separation of body and ive what the faith of childhood has in its own immortality of which those who had the care of her infancy had robbed her

It was delightful to see how she enjoyed the child who had long been a burden to her She wanted his, and to hear all our conversation, and that I should tell her e said in the little time that he could not be with her She declared that she never had knohat the enjoyment of life was till she had it in her sympathy with him All the pleasures of intellect, and also of personal affections of the happiest kind, were pale beside the joy of this child--in his cohts, and had taken hi peevishness, into that joy of childhood which Ruskin speaks of as so entirely out of proportion to the occasions of its expression, and which still had no painful excitement in it, but was sihts but inforratitude The self that lost all sense of boundary, in its joy in the unbounded, spread out to e to me which will, I think, explain to you what I mean Of course, I was the first person on whoh he did not stop with me, but also expressed his love to all ho to me how much he loved , I know you love reat deal more than I can!” Was not that a wonderful expression of the immortal essence of his love,--of Love Divine?

Without its being suggested to hile exception He would be taken to drive in the carriage with his ht at the things he saw on the way, and when he got hoate to say, ”Thank you, horsey!” and all his habits of tiotten when the street musicians came by, and he was allowed to take out pennies to them Callers at the house, from whom he used to shrink when they would have spoken to him, were in wonder at his hospitable welcoent interpositions in the conversation, which they thought indicated precocity instead of backwardness The length, breadth, and depth of all the words Christ let fall in the last part of his life, of which I had had soible tocreated in successive generations, and I was thus prepared to enter into and appreciate Frbel's ideas and methods, hich I did not become acquainted till a quarter of a century later

I want you to observe that in what I did there was simply the spontaneous wisdom of love--love, not fondness, not desire of reciprocation, but self-forgetting and reverent of its object Only this gives the creative method, or is the essence of creativeness, whether human or divine