"_Sense_ of failure. Well. Those are good things. The beginning of better. Those are _live_ things, at any rate."
Then she said,--"But we can't _be_ much, without doing it. I suppose we are put into a world of outsides for something."
"Yes. To find out what it means. That's the inside of it. And to help make the outside agree with the in, so that it will be easier for other people to find out. That is the 'kingdom come and will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.' Heaven is the inside,--the truth of things."
"Why, I never knew"--began Desire, astonished. She had almost finished aloud, as her mother had done in her own mind. She never knew that Uncle Oldways was "pious."
"Never knew that was what it meant? What else can it mean? What do you suppose the resurrection was, or is?"
Desire answered with a yet larger look of wonder, only in the dim light it could not be wholly seen.
"The raising up of the dead; Christ coming up out of the tomb."
"The coming out of the tomb was a small part of it; just what could not help being, if the rest was. Jesus Christ rose out of dead _things_, I take it, into these very real ones that we are talking of, and so lived in them. The resurrection is a man's soul coming alive to the soul of creation--God's soul. _That_ is eternal life, and what Jesus of Nazareth was born to show. Our coming to that is our being 'raised with Him;' and it begins, or ought to, a long way this side the tomb. If people would only read the New Testament, expecting to get as much common sense and earnest there as they do among the new lights and little 'progressive-thinkers' that are trying to find it all out over again, they might spare these gentlemen and themselves a great deal of their trouble."
The exclamation rose half-way to her lips again,--"I never knew you thought like this. I never heard you talk of these things before!"
But she held it back, because she would not stop him by reminding him that he _was_ talking. It was just the truth that was saying itself. She must let it say on, while it would.
She stopped there, at the first syllable. She would not even call him "Uncle Titus" again, for fear of recalling him to himself, and hushing him up.
"There is something--isn't there--about those who _attain_ to that resurrection; those who are _worthy_? I suppose there must be some who are just born to this world, then, and never--'born again?'"