THE AFTER-DEATH

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 272, 14 May 1912, Page 7

THE AFTER-DEATH

j THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER. 1 By Telegraph—Press Association. I Auckland, Monday. Bishop Crossley, in his second sermon on the after-death, said, in answer to

the view that following upon death was a cessation of conscious feeling, and that the dead were a sort of asphyxiated souls existing, but not conscious, that if death meant the suppression of all that made man himsil:. if it was absolute non-consciousness, then Christ had played false with human reason, human deduction, and human hope. In the peace of the other world there was prayer for people of this world intense and unselfish in mind, and by the name of Jesus, to a degree that had never been' maintained on earth. Surely if those who were departed remembered in their prayers those upon earth, tlhen the 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 Hod for the dead. It was an early and continuous practice of the Church to prav for their departed. "There is," he said, "no text in the BiWe to command you to pray for the departed, but also there ir? no tfxt to forbid yon to do so."

On the question whether prayers were to be -restricted to those who died with the sign 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 who could make a spiritual analysis of the process of death and determine the presence or the absence of faith. If it was wrong to pray for the dead, the error had been perpetuated for 1500 years, anil continued by Martin Luther and John Wesley. Burins: the war in South Africa. Archbishop Temple issued a series of prayers, one of them a prayer for those who had fallen. It did not escape criticism, and in March, 1(109, he was accused in the House of Lords of disloyalty to the Church, but he made answe.r that sueli prayers were not outside the limits of the law.