Christ; "if we believe that Jesus died and rose again." It is a mere
platitude to say that the whole of S. Paul's teaching is founded on the
actuality of the resurrection. "If Christ hath not been raised, your
faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins. Then they also which are fallen
asleep in Christ have perished. If in this life only we have hoped in
Christ, we are of all men most miserable" (1 Cor. xv. 17). Then out of
this fact of the resurrection flows a consequence: the dead, as we call
them, "sleep in Jesus," and will be His immediate companions at the last
day. We cannot enter into a discussion as to the exact conditions of
what is called "Hades" or the "intermediate state"; suffice it to say
that one great feature of it is nearness to Jesus, "having a desire to
depart and be with Christ" (Phil. i. 23); "absent from the body, present
with the Lord" (2 Cor. v. 8). Herein consists the blessed hope set
before us in regard to the faithful departed; the crucified, risen,
ascended Jesus has them in His keeping; we and they alike are parts of
the one great Church, knit into the "Communion of Saints" by the mystic
bond of the sacred bread, linked each to the other by mutual prayer;
they for us and we for them.

Very beautifully and tenderly does the Archbishop of Canterbury deal
with this thought in one of his late sermons:--

"As with bowed head and quivering lip we commend their souls into
the hands of a faithful Creator and most merciful Saviour we feel
how the very passing of those brave and buoyant lives into the
world beyond pierces the flimsy barrier between the things which
are seen and temporal and the things which are unseen and eternal,
and again we can and do give thanks. God is not the God of the dead,
but of the living:--

"Nor dare to sorrow with increase of grief
When they who go before
Go furnished, or because their span was brief.
For doubt not but that in the worlds above
There must be other offices of love,
That other tasks and ministries there are,
Since it is promised that His servants there
Shall serve him still. Therefore be strong, be strong,
Ye that remain, nor fruitlessly revolve,
Darkling, the riddles which ye cannot solve,
But do the works that unto you belong."

Here is the magnificent prospect of hope for those who mourn: that
the Incarnation of our Lord is still working itself out in all its
beneficent purposes. By the power of the Holy Ghost, i