r and dearer, and
not farther and vaguer, with the passing years. The hour of devotion
will thus be hallowed, because it will be a holy tryst with absent
friends, as well as a time for making our requests known to our Heavenly
Father. Who can exaggerate the delight and benefit of such an exercise?
What sources of strength are to be found in spiritual association with
our beloved! If we are thus helped why should we presume that they may
not also, by such sweet hours, be strengthened for their duties? I know
this may seem fanciful. I ask no one to follow me who is not ready to do
so. I do not speak dogmatically, but with great earnestness, when I say
that prayer for our beloved after they are gone is a privilege and a
help--I would fain believe both to them and to us.

But it may be objected that the moral state of men is fixed at death,
and that nothing that we or they can do can influence it by a hair's
breadth. That this has been a popular opinion is true; and it is equally
true that many have supposed that all who have had faith on the earth
are in bliss; and that all who have been without faith are in misery;
and that the beatitude of all the good is equal and alike, and that the
misery of all unbelievers is the same.

Such inferences, though held by many for whose scholarship and character
I have profound reverence, seem to me to be contrary to Scripture, to
the analogies of nature, and to the moral sense. Such a theory is
contrary to Christian Scriptures; for the parable of the talents shows
that some will have greater and some lesser reward; and the parable of
Dives and Lazarus has relation only to Hades, or to the state which in
the thought of that time intervened between death and the judgment.

This theory is contrary to the analogies of life on earth. Here change
indicates not a finality but a new opportunity. Every crisis of life is
an opening into a newer and larger world. Why should we say that what we
call death, alone of all the changes through which we pass, leads to
that which is unchangeable?

The theory is contrary to the moral sense of all earnest souls. Who does
not have to compel himself to believe, and that with difficulty, that
death determines forever the fate of all, and that there is neither
possibility of progress nor of going backward after the body is laid
aside?

Let me quote a noble passage from Bishop Welldon: "But if a variety of
destinies in the unseen world, whether of happiness