ith the
dead, or if we had good reason to expect such communications, labor
would be neglected, faith, prayer, hope, confidence in God would
decrease, the Bible would be undervalued through a superior regard to a
different mode of revelation, and we should live, as it were, among the
tombs. A morbid state of feeling would pervade our minds, and the world
would be full of enchantments, necromancy, and cunning craftiness.
Blessed be God for the silence of the dead! We are glad that our weak
and foolish hearts, so prone to love the creature more than the Creator,
are broken off, by the impenetrable veil of death, from all connection
with the departed. The salutary influences of death on survivors would
be greatly lessened, if our connection and communication with them were
continued. God is our chief good, not our friends, nor our children; he
shuts them up in silence from us, to see if we can say, "Whom have I in
heaven but thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides
thee." The painful effect upon our feelings, and upon our nervous
system, of separations from departed friends, is involuntary and
natural; but to cherish our griefs, to spend much time in melancholy
moods, or in poring over the memorials of the departed, so as to excite
and indulge morbid feelings, is not Christian nor wise.

While this is true, and there is much immoderate and irrational grief,
the disposition, with many, is to forget the dead as soon as possible,
and forever. Some need to think far more of the deceased. They should
remember that the dead are alive; that no doubt they think of them; and
that, instead of being separated farther and farther from the deceased,
by the lapse of time, they are every day coming nearer and nearer to
them, and they must meet again.

It is well for us frequently to remember that the silence of the dead is
no true exponent of their real state. Incoherent and wild as the
thoughts and feelings sometimes are, under the distracting influence of
affliction and death, and all uncertain as we are about the departure of
the soul, we are not left without sure and most satisfying information
respecting the separate state.

There is no annihilation. The life of the soul is not extinguished like
the flame of a lamp. Existence is not that lingering, twinkling spark
which it seems to be in the moments preceding death. To be absent from
the body, for a Christian, is to be present with the Lord; to die is
gain; to dep