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 or of suffering, is reserved for mankind, and yet more, if the principle of that world is not inactivity but energy or character or life, it is reasonable to believe that the souls which enter upon the future state with the taint of sin clinging to them, in whatever form or degree, will be slowly cleansed by a disciplinary or purifactory process from whatever it is that, being evil in itself, necessarily obstructs or obscures the vision of God.”  He continues, “And this is the benediction of human nature, to feel that, as souls upon earth are fortified and elevated by the prayers offered for them in the unseen world, so too by our prayers may the souls which have passed behind the veil be lifted higher and higher into the knowledge and contemplation and fruition of God."[10]