ssiahship was a part of their national religious tradition; and
although in some important respects mistaken, they yet, one would think,
have been led to perfect trust in our Lord when they acknowledged His
Messianic claims. But death? They could not get over the apparent
finality of death. But, again, perhaps we are not very far beyond this
in our understanding of it. To us still death seems very final.

But it was just that sense of its finality--of its constituting a
hopeless break in the continuity of existence--that our Lord was engaged
in removing during these days which to them were days of hopelessness
and despair. When they came to know what in these days was taking place;
and when the Church guided by the Holy Spirit came to meditate upon the
meaning of our Lord's action it would see death in a changed light. The
sense of a cataclysmic disaster in death would pass and be replaced by a
sense of the continuity of life. Hitherto attention had been
concentrated on this world, and death had been a disappearence from this
world, the stopping of worldly loves and interests. Presently death
would be seen to be the translation of the human being to a new sphere
of activities, but involving no cessation of consciousness or failure of
personal activities. Men had thought, naturally enough in their lack of
knowledge, of the effect of death on the survivors, of the break in
their relations with the dead. Now death would be viewed from the point
of view of the interests of the person who is dead; and it would emerge
that he continued under different conditions, and in the end it would
come to be seen that even in the relations of the survivors with the
dead there was no necessary and absolute break, but that the new
conditions of life made possible renewed intercourse under altered
circumstances.

Our Lord, the disciples learned not long after, during these days went
to preach to the spirits in prison, which the thought of the Church has
interpreted to mean that He carried the news of the Redemption He had
wrought through His dying, to the place of the dead, to the region where
the souls of the faithful were patiently waiting the time of their
perfecting. The doors of the heavenly world could not be opened till the
time when He by His Cross and Passion, by His death and resurrection,
opened them. The Heads of the Gates could not be lifted till they were
lifted for the entrance of the King of Glory. But once lifted they were