“As with bowed head and quivering lip we commend their souls into the hands of a faithful Creator and most merciful Saviour we feel how the very passing of those brave and buoyant lives into the world beyond pierces the flimsy barrier between the things which are seen and temporal and the things which are unseen and eternal, and again we can and do give thanks.  God is not the God of the dead, but of the living:—­

  “Nor dare to sorrow with increase of grief
  When they who go before
  Go furnished, or because their span was brief. 
  For doubt not but that in the worlds above
  There must be other offices of love,
  That other tasks and ministries there are,
  Since it is promised that His servants there
  Shall serve him still.  Therefore be strong, be strong,
  Ye that remain, nor fruitlessly revolve,
  Darkling, the riddles which ye cannot solve,
  But do the works that unto you belong.”

Here is the magnificent prospect of hope for those who mourn:  that the Incarnation of our Lord is still working itself out in all its beneficent purposes.  By the power of the Holy Ghost, in the Church expectant as in the Church militant, the answer to the constant prayer, “Thy Kingdom come,” is being ceaselessly given; and the fulness thereof will be realised in the Church triumphant.  The saints on earth and those in Paradise are equally in the hands of the Lord, though the latter have clearer vision and nearer sense of the fact than the former.  By some this is used as an argument against the practice of prayer for the departed, but surely this thought of the unity of the whole body leads in exactly the opposite direction.  No argument can be adduced against this most ancient and primitive custom, observed by the Jews long before the coming of Christ, but what equally applies to any petition for an absent friend still on earth.  In each case they are in the keeping of Him Who knows best and will do right, yet for those still here we pray, believing that in His own way God will take account of our prayers and knit them up into His own dealings, so that they become part of His eternal purposes.  When commending the departed to Him, naturally our words will be chastened and restrained because we know somewhat less of the conditions of the “intermediate state” than we do of those of our own dispensation.  Somewhat less; for how little do we really understand of the circumstances around us now in all their bearings as they lie open beneath the eye of God.  Therefore it is that whenever we pray we must ask in full submission to our own limitations and in the spirit of the Master, “Nevertheless not my will, but Thine be done.”

Thank God this matter is not one of argument; no, it lies in another plane:  the innate feeling of one who really knows what prayer means and who has grasped in some degree the doctrine of the “Communion of Saints.”