It is clear that the disembodied soul, if we may again go back to the Bible, is not by our Lord regarded as in a state of lethargy and dull unconsciousness. "To-day," said He, "shalt thou be with Me in Paradise." If this promise was meant to be a blessing and a solace it was meant to be consciously _felt_ as a blessing and a solace. How else could the thief have been in any true sense with Christ? S. Paul said, "For me to live is Christ, to die is gain." {43} Gain! Wherein could it be a gain to him to die, if to die was to exchange that eager, active vitality, so full of welcome pain and happy suffering, so full of a service, whose fruits were rich in blessing,--to exchange all this for dull heaviness and blank oblivion? In the narrative of the rich man and Lazarus, which, as we saw, describes the Intermediate State, the rich man is said to have "lifted up his eyes being in torments." So, then, his pain was felt. He was conscious; he reflected; he remembered; he spoke. Once more, in a remarkable passage in the First Epistle of S. Peter, to which, on a future occasion, I shall again refer, our Lord is spoken of as "having been put to death in the flesh, but quickened," _i.e._, made alive, "in spirit" {44}; words which, whatever the context may mean, can only have the force of bringing the effect of death in its relation to Christ's human body into sharp contrast with its effect in relation to His human spirit. In respect of His human body He was put to death; but in respect of His human spirit He was quickened or lived, lived still, in Paradise, though His body was dead. I need not, I think, refer to other passages. It is abundantly clear, both from the necessity of the thing, and from the obvious testimony of the Bible, that the soul still lives, still is awake, still is conscious.