that human beings are not extinguished at death, it is likely that the awareness of being married, and the joy, is carried over into the next world, or the mystical world all around us. So I must disagree with what Christ is reported as saying in Mathew's gospel, namely that marriages do not exist in heaven. Possibly what he said was correct so far as his audience was concerned; i.e. the type of marriages they were talking about, marriages of convenience; but as a general proposition it was wrong.
However with imperfect trust, no-one in his senses would want marriage to go on after death. However much one loved her, one would have in the end to prefer death to perpetual marriage. No-one can live with continual pain for ever; nor can one live with incomplete trust for ever, and the mutual manipulation that inevitably comes in its train. Incomplete trust differs from complete trust, as the finite differs from the infinite.
All this has a very practical everyday application, the moment it is conceded that a man's conduct moulds his consciousness, and his consciousness moulds his behaviour. If love and marriage do end in death, then it is wrong and wicked to treat one's wife with the kindness and consideration with which one would treat her, if one knew one was going to be with her for an eternity, because one would be leading her up the garden path, into a fool's paradise. Is it wrong and wicked, or even worse a sign of mental illness, to behave like that, as though he or she was immortal? Immortal, not in the sense that you cannot be killed, but in the sense that you have no fear or regard for death. I do not think it is wrong, or even unwise; because this is in fact what children do; and when Lewis Carrol portrays Alice as the arch-type of commonsense in an insane adult world, no adults dissent. Children lack experience; they cannot do things, they cannot run businesses or wage war. But as for mental health, I…