Success Quote by Samuel Butler

Heaven, in Butler's hands, isn't a choir of angels; it's a paperwork apocalypse. The joke lands because it inverts the basic promise of the afterlife. Resurrection should mean restoration and peace, but Butler imagines it as a mass reopening of civil disputes, a cosmic foreclosure sale where the dead return not to reconcile but to litigate.

The "lawyer's dream" is sharpened by its sting: the legal profession thrives on conflict, especially the kind that can never be fully settled. Property is the perfect engine for that, because ownership is always a story we agree to tell - backed by documents, violence, inheritance, and selective memory. If everyone "reclaimed his property", the very act of reclaiming detonates the chain of title: your rightful house is, by definition, stolen from someone else's rightful grandfather. Butler compresses centuries of enclosure, conquest, and inheritance into one elegant paradox. The resurrection doesn't heal history; it resurrects history's grievances with interest.

There's also a Victorian punchline hiding in the premises. Butler was writing in a Britain obsessed with respectability, wills, and the moral legitimacy of wealth. By making forefathers the defendants, he undercuts the comforting idea that inheritance is clean simply because it's old. The afterlife becomes a courtroom where lineage stops being a badge and turns into evidence.

The wit is cold because the target is familiar: our desire to translate morality into property rights. Butler suggests that if justice were truly total, even heaven wouldn't survive the discovery phase.