timorous.  As it is, how eager we are to pry into the future, or into things purposely hidden from us!  If it were certainly known that one had communication with 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 depart, and be with Christ, is far better.  When the dust returns to the earth as it was, the spirit ascends to God, who gave it.  The soul is more vigorous and active than when shut up in the body, because a higher form of life is required in being with God and angels.  We are told that the pious dead are “the spirits of just men made perfect.”