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 seems no ground for rejecting the tradition of invocation except the rather odd ground that we do not know the mode by which our requests reach them! As there are a good many other spiritual facts of which we do not know the mode, I do not think that we need be deterred from the practice of invocation on that ground: certainly the Church has never been so deterred.