AFTER DEATH.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIII, Issue 13, 13 May 1912, Page 5

AFTER DEATH.

BISHOP CROSSLEY'S VIEWS. (Per Press Association.) Auckland, May 13. Bishop Crossley, in a second sermon on "After Death," said, in answer to the view that following upon death was a cessation of conscious feeling, that the dead were a sort of asphyxiated soul existing, but not conscious, that if death meant the suppression of all, that made man himself, if it was absolute non-consciousness, then Christ played false with human reason, human deduction, and human hope. In the peace and in the distraction, of the other world there was prayer for the people of this world, intense and unsellisti, in mind and by the name of Jesus to a degree thai had never been maintained on earth. Surely if those who were departed remembered in their prayers those upon earth, then Che "world should remember the departed. He gave a warning against the mistake that prayers for the dead were prayers to the dead—they were prayers to God for tin dead. It was an early and continuous practice of the Church to pray for their departed. There is no text in the Bible to command you to pray for the departed, but also there is no text to forbid you to do so. On the question whether prayers were to be restricted to those who die with th< s gn of faith, he said there was no doubt that prayers and liturgies were only for those who died in the faith; but who was there could make ;■

spiritual analysis of the process o: death and determine the presence or the absence of faith? If it was wrong to pray for the dead, the error had been perpetuatd for 1500 years, and continued by Martin Luther and John Wesley. During the war in South Africa, Archbishop Temple issued a. series of prayers, one of tnem a. prayei for those who had fallen. It did noi escape criticism, and in March, 1900 ho was accused in the House of Lord: of disloyalty to tin- Church ; but Ik made answer that such prayers wen not outside the limits of the law.