embers one of another. Our
spiritual life is not our own affair, but we have duties one to another,
and all the members of the Body are concerned in our exercise of our
gifts, have, in fact, claims on the exercise of them.

This mutual inherence of the members of the Body and these obligations
to one another are in strict subordination to the Head; but they are
very real duties and privileges which are ours to exercise. What we are
concerned with at present is that from, this view of them that I have
been presenting there results the possibility and obligation of
intercession; the love and care of the members for one another is
exercised in their prayers for one another. This privilege of
intercession is one of the privileges most widely valued and most
constantly exercised throughout the Church. Days of intercession,
litanies, the offering of the Blessed Sacrifice with special intention,
the constant requests for prayers for objects in which people are
interested, all testify to the value we place on the privilege. Here is
one action in regard to which there is no doubting voice in Christendom.

But curiously, and for some reason to me wholly unintelligible, there
are a great many who think of this right and duty of intercession
between the members of the One Body as exclusively the right and duty of
those who are living here on earth; or at least if it pertain to the
"dead" it is in a way in which we can have no part. One would think--and
so the Catholic Church has always thought--that those whom we call dead,
but who are really "alive unto God" with a life more intense, a life
more spiritually clear-visioned, than our own, would have a special
power and earnestness in prayer, and that a share in their intercessions
is a spiritual privilege much to be valued. They are members with us of
the same Body; death has not cut them off from their membership,
rather, if possible, it has intensified it, or at least their perception
of what is involved in it. They remain under all the obligations of the
life of the Body and consequently under the obligation to care for other
members of the Body. The intercession of the saints for us is a fact
that the Church has never doubted and cannot doubt except under penalty
of denying at the same time the existence of the Body. That certain
members of the Church have of late years doubted our right to invoke the
saints, to call upon them for the aid of their prayers, is true; but
there se