"Are they all hypocrites, do you think, Charlie?" she said suddenly,
looking up into my face.
"They? who? Bessie, what have I done to make you angry?"
"You? Nothing, dear goose! I am angry at myself and at everybody else.
Did it flash upon you, Charlie, what we were singing?"
Then she quoted the lines, which I will not repeat here, but they
expressed, as the sole aspiration of the singer, a desire to pass
eternity in singing hymns of joy and praise--an impatience for the
time to come, a disregard of earth, a turning away from temporal
things, and again the desire for an eternity of sacred song.
"Suppose I confess to you," said I, astonished at her earnestness,
"that I did not at all know what I was singing?"
"That's just it! just what makes it so dreadful! _Nobody_ was thinking
about it--nobody! Nobody there wanted to give up earth and go straight
to heaven and sing. I looked round at all the people, with their new
bonnets, and the diamonds, and the footmen in the pews up stairs, and
I thought, What lies they are all saying! Nobody wants to go to heaven
at all until they are a hundred years old, and too deaf and blind and
tired out to do anything on earth. My heaven is here and now in my own
happiness, and so is yours, Charlie; and I felt so convicted of being
a story-teller that I couldn't hold the book in my hand.
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