crumbled.

A dear friend goes away from us to a foreign land. We watch the
receeding sail, and feel that that is a bond between us, until it fades
away in the far blue horizon. Then it is a consolation to walk by the
shore of that sea, and to realize that the same waters lave the other
shore, where he dwells,--to watch some star, and know that at such an
hour his eye and thought are also directed to it. Thus the soul will not
entertain the idea of absolute separation, but makes all those material
objects agents for its affinities. But how much nearer does that absent
one come to us, when we know that at such an hour we both are kneeling
in prayer, and that our spirits meet, as it were, around the footstool
of God!

Thus we see that even in life there are spiritual relations which bind
us to our fellows, and that often these are dearer and stronger than
those of local contact. Why should we suppose that death cuts off all
such affinities? It does not cut them off. It only removes the loved
from our converse and our sight; but if, when absent in some distant
land of this earth, we are conscious of still holding relations to them,
do we not retain the same though they have vanished into that mysterious
and unseen land which lies beyond the grave? "She is not dead, but
sleepeth." Christianity has taught us to look away from the ghastly
secrets of the sepulchre, and not consider that changing clay as the
friend we mourn, but as only the cast-off and mouldering garment. It has
kindled within us a lively appreciation of the continued existence of
those who have gone from us; taught us to feel that the thoughts, the
love, the real life of the departed, all, in fact, that communed with
us here below, still lives and acts. And our relations to them are
relations which we bear, not to abstractions of memory, to phantoms
of by-gone joy, but to spiritual intelligences, whose current of being
flows on uninterrupted, with whose current of being our own mingles.
I know not how it is with others, but to me there is inexpressible
consolation in this thought.

But I would suggest that, as spiritual beings, we bear even a closer
relation to the departed. I said that Christianity has transformed the
whole idea of life. It has shown that we are essentially spirits, and
that our highest relations are spiritual. If so, it seems an arrogant
assumption to deny that any intercourse may exist between ourselves
and the spiritual world. Possessi