French Abbé of the seventeenth century to a King's mistress who, upon her death-bed, was seized by spiritual qualms—"God would think twice before damning a lady of your quality." And no one who holds by class-distinctions really wishes to find in the New Jerusalem any abolition of that respect for persons or prejudices which has, in this world, been the main ground on which their self-esteem and their estimate of personality have been based.
To them the most "unthinkable" proposition would be not the contraction of the future world to narrower and more select limits than those of the one they know, but a future world conducted on any code of morals which had not their own entire approval and sanction.
We are told that the late Queen Victoria looked forward with very great interest to a future meeting with the Hebrew patriarchs, with Abraham, Moses, and Elijah, but hoped to be excused from any personal acquaintance with King David on account of his affair with Bathsheba. And when we realise how very often the hope of Heaven is really a species of self-love and self-applause, conditional on Heaven being what we ourselves want it to be, one is led to wonder whether the real condition for entry into that state of bliss may not prove to be the precise opposite, and whether the disciplinary motto upon its portal may not be those mystic words, hitherto
