there is a far more
probable answer. It is this: That it is not you who will have to do
the recognizing; at any rate that you will not be first with it.

If it be true, as we have reason to believe (see next chapter), that
your dear one there is watching your life on earth, of course he would
know you at once. While, year by year, you have been changing from
youth to old age he has been near you all the time. He knows you as
familiarly as if he had been on earth beside you. Probably he has been
waiting and watching as you came through.

And whatever change has passed on him in his new life, surely he too
will be easier to recognize when he has claimed you first.

Whether this suggestion appeals or no, at any rate we need have no
doubt that we shall know one another there. Nay, shall we not know
each other there far more thoroughly than we do here? "Now," says St.
Paul, "we see in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face. Now I know
in part, then shall I know even as also I have been known." St. Paul's
thought is of our fuller knowledge of things hereafter. Does it not
include also our fuller knowledge of one another? I met this passage
lately in a letter of Phillips Brooks: "I wonder what sort of knowledge
we shall have of our friends in the Hereafter and what we shall do to
keep up our intimacy with one another. There will be one good thing
about it. I suppose we shall see through one another to begin with and
start off on quite a new basis of mutual understanding. I should think
it would be awful at first, but afterwards it must be nice to feel that
your friends knew the worst of you and you need not be continually in
fear that they will find out what you really are."

I think a simple natural thought such as that seems to bring the idea
of spiritual recognition more within our ken. But we must remember
that our conjectures about the MODE of recognition have very little
basis. The FACT of recognition we may practically assume. The "how"
we must leave with God.

"Soul of my soul I shall meet thee again.
With God be the rest."

[1] Momerie. Immortality.

CHAPTER VIII

THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS

We have already seen that the evidence of Scriptures leads us to the
assurance that our dear ones departed are living a vivid, conscious
life; that there is continuance of personal identity. "I" am still
"I," and that there is memory still, clear and distinct, of the old
friends and the