rch, and the
much smaller number who hold what they delight in affirming is "the true
theology," and who have insisted that when men die their state is
irrevocably and forever fixed, the good going at once into the perfect
bliss of heaven and the wicked into the suffering of hell.

It will be more profitable for us to deal with the positive side of our
subject than to attempt to clear away misconceptions and half truths.

What is meant by prayers for the dead? Exactly the same as prayers for
those in the body. When the body dies the soul, or the essential man, is
not touched by death. The personality is that which thinks, chooses,
lives. Your mother is not the form on which your eyes rested, or the
arms which encircled you, but the thought, the devotion, the affection
concealed, yet revealed, by the body, and which use it for their
instrument. In reality we never saw our dearest friends; what we saw
was color, form, but never the spirit. That is disclosed through the
body, but is not identified with it. Now just as we have prayed for a
mother, or a child, or a friend whose physical form is familiar, but
whose personality we have seen only in its revelations, so we continue
to pray for that loved one which we do not see any more, or any less,
after what is called death.

In other words, instead of thinking of any as dead, we think of all as
alive, although many of them are in the unseen sphere. Love and sympathy
have never been dependent on the body except for expression, and there
is no evidence that they ever will be. Sympathy and affection, thought
and will, are matters of spirit; and why may not spirit feel for spirit
and minister to spirit, when the body is laid aside? Your hands, your
feet, your lips did not pray for your child; your spirit prayed for his
spirit, and now that his body is laid aside, like a worn-out garment,
you may keep on doing just what you did before. This is what is meant by
prayers for the dead.

I am well aware that it may seem to some that these statements rest
largely on assumptions, but they are not baseless assumptions. One other
assumption must be made before we can proceed in our study, and that one
is the truthfulness of the Christian teaching that death is not
cessation of being, but only the decay of the bodily organism.

How may prayers for the dead be justified? Are they taught as a duty in
the Scriptures? The privilege rests not so much on particular
exhortations as upon the