Your own heart and
spirit will be your only guides. There is no such thing as compulsion or
force in heaven. Nothing can be done to you that you do not choose or
allow to be done."
"Yes," I said, "it is the blessed and beautiful sense of freedom from
all ties and influences and fears that is so utterly blissful."
"But this is not all," said Amroth, shaking his head with a smile.
"This is a time of rest for you, but things are very different elsewhere.
When you come to enter heaven itself, you will be constantly surprised.
There are labour and fear and sorrow to be faced; and you must not
think it is a place for drifting pleasantly along. The moral struggle
is the same--indeed it is fiercer and stronger than ever, because there
is no bodily languor or fatigue to distract. There are choices to be
made, duties to perform, evil to be faced. The bodily temptations
are absent, but there is still that which lay behind the bodily
frailties--curiosity, love of sensation, excitement, desire; the strong
duality of nature--the knowledge of duty on the one hand and the
indolent shrinking from performance--that is all there; there is the
same sense of isolation, and the same need for patient endeavour as upon
earth.
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