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Page 45
What art thou then? I cannot guess;
But tho' I seem in star and flower
To feel thee some diffusive power,
I do not therefore love thee less:
My love involves the love before;
My love is vaster passion now;
Tho' mixed with God and Nature thou,
I seem to love thee more and more.
Far off thou art, but ever nigh;
I have thee still, and I rejoice;
I prosper, circled with thy voice;
I shall not lose thee tho' I die.
--_In Memoriam._ Tennyson.
XI
_PRAYERS FOR THE DEAD_
The wisest of men have little to guide them when they approach that
mysterious realm from which no traveler has ever returned. With humility
and the consciousness that we must, at the best, walk in the twilight, I
take up one of the most mysterious and fascinating of themes. No one has
any right to speak positively on such a subject, and I shall not do so.
Those who have the assurance of sight when they write about what lies
beyond the grave are both to be envied and to be pitied,--envied because
of their confidence, pitied because they may be self-deceived.
Let me make my exact purpose as plain as I can by an illustration. A
dear friend, one with whom you have associated for years, enters the
silent life. The morning following, as has long been your custom, you
offer your prayers to the Heavenly Father, and, as usual, mention that
friend by name. Suddenly you stop and say to yourself, "I can no more
offer that petition, for my friend is now beyond the need of my poor
prayers." Then, suddenly and swiftly, come the questions, Although my
friend is called dead is he any less alive than when he was in the body?
Will not all that constituted his personality continue to grow in the
future as in the past? Does the death of the body do anything more than
change the mode of the spirit's existence? And the result is that you
say to yourself, "I will continue to pray for my friend, for, if he is
alive now, every reason which led to prayers before his death justifies
their continuance."
From more than one person I have heard words similar to these which I
have put into this hypothetical form; and because of these expressions
of sane and sacred experience I am led to ask my readers to follow me in
the consideration of a subject which is seldom mentioned, except with
incredulity, by most Protestants.
No one who may not appreciate the importance of this subject should be
either troubled or heedless. We learn our lessons concerning the
profounder mysteries simply by living. No one can be blamed for not
appreciating what he is not yet, either intellectually or spiritually,
ready to receive. Providence takes good care of us. When we are prepared
for the reception of any truth it usually finds us.
This subject has been regarded with suspicion by two classes of
thinkers: Protestants who have revolted from the extent to which praying
for the dead has been carried in the Roman Catholic Church, and the
much smaller number who hold what they delight in affirming is "the true
theology," and who have insisted that when men die their state is
irrevocably and forever fixed, the good going at once into the perfect
bliss of heaven and the wicked into the suffering of hell.
It will be more profitable for us to deal with the positive side of our
subject than to attempt to clear away misconceptions and half truths.
What is meant by prayers for the dead? Exactly the same as prayers for
those in the body. When the body dies the soul, or the essential man, is
not touched by death. The personality is that which thinks, chooses,
lives. Your mother is not the form on which your eyes rested, or the
arms which encircled you, but the thought, the devotion, the affection
concealed, yet revealed, by the body, and which use it for their
instrument. In reality we never saw our dearest friends; what we saw
was color, form, but never the spirit. That is disclosed through the
body, but is not identified with it. Now just as we have prayed for a
mother, or a child, or a friend whose physical form is familiar, but
whose personality we have seen only in its revelations, so we continue
to pray for that loved one which we do not see any more, or any less,
after what is called death.
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