22 February 2024: "Can’t people tell picture from substance, a metaphor from its meaning? That book of Revelation is precisely what it professes to be,—a vision; a symbol. A symbol of something, to be sure, and rich with pleasant hopes, but still a symbol. Now, I really believe that a large proportion of Christian church-members, who have studied their Bible, attended Sabbath schools, listened to sermons all their lives, if you could fairly come at their most definite idea of the place where they expect to spend eternity, would own it to be the golden city, with pearl gates, and jewels in the wall. It never occurs to them, that, if one picture is literal, another must be. If we are to walk golden streets, how can we stand on a sea of glass? How can we ‘sit on thrones’? How can untold millions of us ‘lie in Abraham’s bosom’?” (Phelps 46).
In this passage, Mary's Aunt Winifred just tears into Biblical literalism. This book is something else. Phelps wrote this in 1868--and it was a huge bestseller!
Work Cited
Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Gates Ajar. 1868. Edited by Elizabeth Duquette and Claudia Stokes, Penguin, 2019.
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