This mutual inherence of the members of the Body and these obligations to one another are in strict subordination to the Head; but they are very real duties and privileges which are ours to exercise.  What we are concerned with at present is that from, this view of them that I have been presenting there results the possibility and obligation of intercession; the love and care of the members for one another is exercised in their prayers for one another.  This privilege of intercession is one of the privileges most widely valued and most constantly exercised throughout the Church.  Days of intercession, litanies, the offering of the Blessed Sacrifice with special intention, the constant requests for prayers for objects in which people are interested, all testify to the value we place on the privilege.  Here is one action in regard to which there is no doubting voice in Christendom.

But curiously, and for some reason to me wholly unintelligible, there are a great many who think of this right and duty of intercession between the members of the One Body as exclusively the right and duty of those who are living here on earth; or at least if it pertain to the “dead” it is in a way in which we can have no part.  One would think—­and so the Catholic Church has always thought—­that those whom we call dead, but who are really “alive unto God” with a life more intense, a life more spiritually clear-visioned, than our own, would have a special power and earnestness in prayer, and that a share in their intercessions is a spiritual privilege much to be valued.  They are members with us of the same Body; death has not cut them off from their membership, rather, if possible, it has intensified it, or at least their perception of what is involved in it.  They remain under all the obligations of the life of the Body and consequently under the obligation to care for other members of the Body.  The intercession of the saints for us is a fact that the Church has never doubted and cannot doubt except under penalty of denying at the same time the existence of the Body.  That certain members of the Church have of late years doubted our right to invoke the saints, to call upon them for the aid of their prayers, is true; but there seems no ground for rejecting the tradition of invocation except the rather odd ground that we do not know the mode by which our requests reach them!  As there are a good many other spiritual facts of which we do not know the mode, I do not think that we need be deterred from the practice of invocation on that ground:  certainly the Church has never been so deterred.

It is strange how little people attempt to think out their religion, and especially their obligation to religious practice.  I have so often heard people say, when the practice of invocation of saints was urged:  Why ask the saints?  Why not go directly to God?  And these same people are constantly asking the prayers of their fellow Christians here on earth!  Suppose when some pious soul comes