But it was just that sense of its finality—­of its constituting a hopeless break in the continuity of existence—­that our Lord was engaged in removing during these days which to them were days of hopelessness and despair.  When they came to know what in these days was taking place; and when the Church guided by the Holy Spirit came to meditate upon the meaning of our Lord’s action it would see death in a changed light.  The sense of a cataclysmic disaster in death would pass and be replaced by a sense of the continuity of life.  Hitherto attention had been concentrated on this world, and death had been a disappearence from this world, the stopping of worldly loves and interests.  Presently death would be seen to be the translation of the human being to a new sphere of activities, but involving no cessation of consciousness or failure of personal activities.  Men had thought, naturally enough in their lack of knowledge, of the effect of death on the survivors, of the break in their relations with the dead.  Now death would be viewed from the point of view of the interests of the person who is dead; and it would emerge that he continued under different conditions, and in the end it would come to be seen that even in the relations of the survivors with the dead there was no necessary and absolute break, but that the new conditions of life made possible renewed intercourse under altered circumstances.

Our Lord, the disciples learned not long after, during these days went to preach to the spirits in prison, which the thought of the Church has interpreted to mean that He carried the news of the Redemption He had wrought through His dying, to the place of the dead, to the region where the souls of the faithful were patiently waiting the time of their perfecting.  The doors of the heavenly world could not be opened till the time when He by His Cross and Passion, by His death and resurrection, opened them.  The Heads of the Gates could not be lifted till they were lifted for the entrance of the King of Glory.  But once lifted they were lifted forever; and when He ascended up on high He led His troop of captives redeemed from the bondage of death and hell.

It is through these lifted Gates that the companies of the sanctified have been streaming ever since; and the difference that has been made in our view of death has been immense.  If we have the faith of a Christian death has been transformed.  There remains, of course, the natural grief which is ours when we part from those whom we love.  This grief is natural and holy as it is in fact an expression of our love.  It is not rebellion against the will of God, but is the expression of a feeling wherewith God has endowed us.  But there is no longer in it the sting of hopelessness that we find, for instance, in the inscriptions on pagan tombs, nay, on tombs still, though created by Christians and found in Christian cemeteries.  Rather it is the expression of a love which is learning to exercise itself under new conditions.