We do not find it possible to reverse all our habits in a moment; and the new relation with the dead is one to which we have to learn to accustom ourselves.  I remember a case where a mother and a son had never been separated for more than a day at a time, though he was far on in manhood.  There came a time of indeterminate separation and the mother’s grief was intense notwithstanding that there was no thought of a permanent separation.  It took some time for her to accustom herself to the new mode of communication by letter.  It is not far otherwise in death; it takes some time for us to accustom ourselves to the new mode of intercourse through prayer, but we succeed, and the new intercourse is very real and very precious.  In a sense, too, it is a nearer, more intimate intercourse.  It lacks the homely, daily touches, no doubt; but in compensation it reveals to us the spiritual values in life.  We speedily learn, we learn almost by a spiritual instinct, what are the common grounds on which we can now meet.  By our intercourse with our dead we get a new grasp on the truth of our common life in Christ:  it is in and through Him that all our converse is now mediated.  We have little difficulty in knowing what are the thoughts and interests which may be shared under the new conditions in which we find ourselves.  Our perception of spiritual interests and spiritual values grows and deepens, and our communion with our dead becomes an indication of the extent of our own spiritual growth.

There come times in the spiritual experience of most of us when we seem to have got to the end.  There is a deepening sense of failure which is not, when we analyse it, so much a failure in this or that detail, as a general sense of the futility of the life of the Church as expressed in our individual lives.  It came to those primitive congregations, you remember, to which S. Peter was writing; “Where is the promise of his coming?  For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.”  It is the weariness of continuous effort from which we conclude that we are getting quite insufficient results.

No doubt that is true.  The results are never what we expect, possibly because the effort is never what we imagine it to be.  We continually underestimate the opposing force of evil, the difficulty of dealing with a humanity which falls so easily under the slightest temptation.  It is not that sinners decline to hear the Word of God, but that those who profess themselves to be the servants of God, and who in fact intend to be such, are so lamentably weak and ineffective.  We think of the effort of God in the Incarnation; we have been following that effort in some detail through the Passion.  We are surprised, shocked, disheartened by the spectacle of the hatred that innocence stirs up, at the lengths men will go when they see their personal ends threatened.  We are horrified by Caiphas, Pilate, Herod.  But is that the really horrifying thing about the Passion of our Lord?  To me the supreme example of human incomprehension is that all the disciples forsook Him and fled, that He was left to die almost alone.  There we get the most disheartening failure in the tragedy.