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the souls of the dying from the gate of death on to the place of their final abode. When they pass the gate of death, there are two ways, one to the right, and the other to the left. The unjust are dragged by force to the left hand by the angels allotted for punishment. The just are guided to the right hand, and are led with hymns, sung by the angels appointed over that place, into a region of light, in which the just have dwelt from the beginning of the world."

If heaven is a place distant from the earth, the departing spirit will need a guide to conduct it thither. Who are the guides of the saints in this untried way, if not those ministering spirits which have charge over them in all their ways? No wonder then that they are often seen hovering around, in the dying visions of the saints. Eager to receive the struggling spirit, they press through the veil, or lift it gently up to the dying Christian, and look from behind it upon him with smiles of winning welcome. There they are, unseen by those who stand weeping around the bed, but seen by him whose vision for spiritual things is becoming bright in proportion as it becomes dim to earth. No wonder that the dying saint is often seen to throw up his arms with unearthly energy, crying, in joyful triumph, "They come! they come!" Yes, they have come! The vision is no phantom of a reeling brain. It is real. It is the "chariots of Israel and the horsemen thereof," waiting at the bed of death. They have come, the heavenly convoy! They have come! they have come!

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,
And flesh and spirit sever:

When earth and fatherland and home,
With all their beauty sink in gloom
Say, will it be for ever?

Will we, in heaven, no more review

Those scenes from which we sever?

Or will our recollection leap

O'er death's dark gulf, at times, to keep
With earth acquaintance ever?

In life we love the blessed past,
It clings upon us ever:

The songs of childhood and of home,
Like music when the minstrel's gone,
Live in our hearts for ever!

The child's included in the man,
And part of him for ever;—
The Past still in the Future lives,
And basis to its being gives,

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 triumphs— and 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