But if we grant this, we may go further. What is it which makes memory in this life so imperfect? What is it but the obtrusive hindrance of the body? The body is at the mercy of the disturbing assaults of present impressions. Through ear, and eye, and touch external objects invade the mind, and dispel and distract fixed and steadfast retrospect. The present blots out the past. When we look back, scenes, and events, and words, and names fade from our memory, and are dimmed by the haze of distance. The past is smothered by what has happened since. Only with a supreme effort, only in solitude, and then only imperfectly, can we recall what has gone by. But there, in the Intermediate State, when the soul dwells apart from the body, there, in the stillness of that "cloistered and secluded life," the powers of memory will be undistracted and perfect. Even in this life, as we are told, some, in a great crisis, have seen at a single glance the whole story of their past experience, and scenes and events, long since forgotten, have flashed in an instant before the mind, clear and vivid. Such clearness, we may well suppose, will the memory have in the Intermediate Life, as it recalls in that quiet stillness the actions of the past days on earth. Here is the first equipment then for the work of cleansing. All the evil things done in life, all the forgotten sins, in all their naked and uncouth colours, will stand undisguised before the mind. Nothing will escape the memory:--nothing. The days of childhood, of youth, of middle age, of elder years will give in their report. The soul will see things then as they are, no longer tricked out in false and flattering guise. There, in all their miserable littleness, and coarseness, and meanness, and cowardice, bygone sins will rise up before the stern tribunal of the unsparing memory, each as it was, each as it is, each as GOD saw it at the time, each as GOD sees it now.