Bright angels are from glory come They're round his bed, they're in his room: They wait to waft his spirit home — All is well-all is well! Farewell, earth! See they cleave the heavens! "Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors!" SECTION III. SAINTLY SYMPATHY. When once we close our eyes in death, When earth and fatherland and home, Will we, in heaven, no more review O'er death's dark gulf, at times, to keep In life we love the blessed past, The songs of childhood and of home, The child's included in the man, Not it, but of it, ever! Will death completely and for ever shut from departed saints this present world? Will sympathy with it, and the remembrance of it perish from their minds? or will the home of their childhood, the paths of their wanderings, and all that they loved and lost on earth, be still remembered by them in heaven? Have the dead in Christ forgotten us? Do they think of us and love us no more? Are they interested in our behalf still as they were on earth? Do they know anything of our fortunes or misfortunes-are they, to any extent, aware of our joys and sorrows do they sympathize with us in our temptations and triumphsand are they sensible of our love to them? Answers to these interesting questions will be attempted in this section, and may be gathered from the observations which are made on the following propositions. In this form, for the sake of order, we shall say what we can find, in reason and scripture, to say of saintly sympathy between heaven and earth. 1. WE HAVE COMMUNION WITH THE SAINTS IN HEAVEN. This communion is, of course, only between SAINTS on earth and saints in heaven. Between an unconverted soul on earth, and the spirit of a just one made perfect in heaven, there can be no sympathy. Between a saint and a sinner, even on earth, there is no spiritual communion. The fellowship which they enjoy with each other is grounded merely in flesh and nature; it can rise no higher, and, consequently, as these perish in death, the fellowship based on them must come to an end. "What fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?" The answer is, most emphatically, none! "Indeed," says the learned and pious Bishop Pierson, "the saint departed, before his death, had some communion with the hypocrite, as hearing the word, professing the faith, receiving the sacraments together; which being in things only external, as they were common to them both, and all such external actions ceasing in the person dead, the hypocrite remaining loseth all communion with the saint departing, and the saints surviving cease also to have their farther fellowship with the hypocrite dying. But being the true and unfeigned holiness of God, not only remaineth, but also is improved, after death; being the correspondence of the internal holiness was the communion between their persons in their life, they cannot be said to be divided by death, which had no power over that sanctity by which they were first conjoined." I BELIEVE IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS. This has been the voice of the church for many centuries. This voice comes to us through the quiet medium of by-gone ages, not in the upstart impulse and hurry of heated. passion, but with ever-increasing strength and calmness, as the sober confession of the Christian consciousness. It is not a confession objectively seen and coldly proclaimed, but it is subjectively felt and uttered. It is not the language of youthful hope and longing, which trusts in, and rests upon, fancies; but it is the language of aged truthfulness and sagely experience. While, in the history of the church, many enthusiastic and superstitious dogmas have started up, lived an ephemeral life, and died away only to be revived and repeated with similar folly and disappointment in after ages, this article of our precious faith has lived in the church with uninterrupted power and consolation through the deep floods and fierce flames of her trials and triumphs. The martyr at the stake, when about to be sundered from the visible fellowship of the church on earth; the pious monk in his deep solitude; the missionary, self-exiled for Christ's sake; the persecuted and banished, when strangers in a strange land -all repeated, in their darkest hours, and in their fiercest trials, with joyful unction, "I believe in the communion of saints!" What so precious now as this article! We see the saints separated by difference in views, by party peculiarities, by distance in time and space, yea, and by the dark stream of death which separates earth from heaven, yet we can rise by the mysterious power of faith above time and space, above feeling and thought, above prophecy, tongues, and knowledge, which must cease, above the distinction of earth and heaven, and realize consciously, in the element of eternal life, the communion of saints. Let us see what the church means by the communion of saints, and how this article of our catholic undoubted Christian faith is derived from the sacred scriptures. The particulars involved in the communion of saints. are briefly but ably discussed and stated by Bishop Pierson in his exposition of the creed. After a critical and historical discussion of it, and after having fortified every point by reason, scripture, and the testimony of the church, he sums up the whole thus: "Every one may learn from hence what he is to understand by this part of the article, in which he professes to believe in the communion of saints; for thereby he is conceived to express thus much: I am fully persuaded of this as of a necessary and infallible truth, that such persons as are truly sanctified in the church of Christ, while they live among the crooked generations of men, and struggle with all the miseries of this world, have fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, as dwelling with them, and taking up their habitations in them: that they partake of the care and kindness of the blessed angels, who take delight in ministrations for their benefit: that beside the external fellowship which they have in the word and sacraments with all the members of the church, they have an intimate union and conjunction with all the saints on earth as the living members of Christ: nor is this union separated by the death of any, but as Christ in whom they live is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, so have they fellowship with all the saints which from the death of Abel have ever departed in the true faith and fear of God, and now enjoy the presence of the Father, and follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth. And thus I believe in THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS." We have already, in a previous section, considered the subject of divine and angelic sympathy. It remains only now to consider that which pertains to saintly sympathy. Even here we need only consider, as proper to our present subject, that part of saintly communion which has reference to the sympathy of saints on earth with saints in heaven. Our conceptions of this communion will be much conditioned by, and receive their complexion from, ir ideas of the church, as its basis and medium. For |