d the terrors of the judgment seat of
Christ. Does not our own Prayer Book sanction this view in her Service
for the Burial of the Dead? {41b} And do we not in common language
ourselves express the same belief when we give to the resting place of
the bodies of the dead the name of 'cemetery,' or sleeping place?"

The answer to all this is that the language which represents death as a
profound slumber is language applicable enough to describe what befalls
the body, but is quite inapplicable when it is used of the soul. Sleep
is distinctly a physical and corporeal function. The soul cannot be
liable to or affected by corporeal influences when it is separated from
the body. The soul cannot sleep. It is the body, in the hushed
stillness of the chamber of death, which seems, now that the last
struggle is over, and the spasm of dying leaves it motionless, to be
sleeping. But even in life, while the body sleeps, the soul is awake. It
is often, during the sleep of the body, even more active than during the
waking hours. In dreams the soul is busy with its fancies. Thoughts
flit this way and that through the mind of the sleeper. Indeed, the body
is more often a hindrance rather than a help to the activities of
thought. To lose all consciousness of the existence of the body, to be
as if the body for the time were not,--this is to set the mind thinking
in freedom unrestrained. For the body and the conscious sensation of the
presence of the body seem to serve to drag down and encumber the energy
of thought. A sound through the ear, a sight presented to the eye, a
touch, an ache,--these break off sustained thinking. No wonder, when the
body sleeps profoundly, the soul is often then most active. And will not
this be so when the profoundest sleep of all falls upon the body?

It is clear that the disembodied soul, if we may again go back to the
Bible, is not by our Lord regarded as in a state of lethargy and dull
unconsciousness. "To-day," said He, "shalt thou be with Me in Paradise."
If this promise was meant to be a blessing and a solace it was meant to
be consciously _felt_ as a blessing and a solace. How else could the
thief have been in any true sense with Christ? S. Paul said, "For me to
live is Christ, to die is gain." {43} Gain! Wherein could it be a gain
to him to die, if to die was to exchange that eager, active vitality, so
full of welcome pain and happy suffering, so full of a service, whose
fruits were