What is meant by prayers for the dead? Exactly the same as prayers for those in the body. When the body dies the soul, or the essential man, is not touched by death. The personality is that which thinks, chooses, lives. Your mother is not the form on which your eyes rested, or the arms which encircled you, but the thought, the devotion, the affection concealed, yet revealed, by the body, and which use it for their instrument. In reality we never saw our dearest friends; what we saw was color, form, but never the spirit. That is disclosed through the body, but is not identified with it. Now just as we have prayed for a mother, or a child, or a friend whose physical form is familiar, but whose personality we have seen only in its revelations, so we continue to pray for that loved one which we do not see any more, or any less, after what is called death. In other words, instead of thinking of any as dead, we think of all as alive, although many of them are in the unseen sphere. Love and sympathy have never been dependent on the body except for expression, and there is no evidence that they ever will be. Sympathy and affection, thought and will, are matters of spirit; and why may not spirit feel for spirit and minister to spirit, when the body is laid aside? Your hands, your feet, your lips did not pray for your child; your spirit prayed for his spirit, and now that his body is laid aside, like a worn-out garment, you may keep on doing just what you did before. This is what is meant by prayers for the dead. I am well aware that it may seem to some that these statements rest largely on assumptions, but they are not baseless assumptions. One other assumption must be made before we can proceed in our study, and that one is the truthfulness of the Christian teaching that death is not cessation of being, but only the decay of the bodily organism. How may prayers for the dead be justified? Are they taught as a duty in the Scriptures? The privilege rests not so much on particular exhortations as upon the whole Christian teaching concerning immortality. God is the God of the living. Bishop Pearson in his exposition of the Apostles' Creed has an impressive passage, which I quote: "The communion of saints in the Church of Christ with those who are departed is demonstrated by their communion with the saints alive. For if I have a communion with a saint of God, as such, while he liveth here, I must still have communion with him when he is departed hence; because the foundation of that communion cannot be removed by death. The mystical union between Christ and His Church ... is the true foundation of that communion.... But death, which is nothing else but the separation of the soul from the body, maketh no separation in the mystical union, no breach of the spiritual conjunction, and consequently there must be the same communion, because there remaineth the same foundation."[9] [Footnote 9: Quoted in Welldon's "Hope of Immortality," page 332.]