“I am fully persuaded of this, as a necessary and infallible truth, that such persons as are truly sanctified in the Church of Christ, while they live in the crooked generations of men and struggle with all the miseries of this world, have fellowship with God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost ... that they partake of the kindness and care of the blessed angels who take delight in ministrations for their benefit, that ... they have an intimate union and conjunction with all the saints on earth as being members of Christ; NOR IS THIS UNION SEPARATED BY THE DEATH OF ANY, but they have communion with all the saints who, from the death of Abel, have departed this life in the fear of God, and now enjoy the presence of the Father, and follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth.
“And thus I believe in the Communion of Saints.”
Now, we appeal to the consciences of modern Christians whether this statement of the doctrine of the Communion of Saints represents the doctrine that they have heard preached from the pulpit, and whether it has been made practically so much the food and nourishment of their souls as to give them all the support under affliction and bereavement which it certainly is calculated to do?
Do they really believe themselves to partake in their life-struggle of the kindness and care of the blessed angels who take delight in ministrations for their benefit? Do they believe they are united by intimate bonds with all Christ’s followers? Do they believe that the union is not separated by the death of any of them, but that they have communion with all the saints who have departed this life in the faith and now enjoy the presence of the Father?
Would not a sermon conceived in the terms of this standard treatise excite an instant sensation as tending toward the errors of Spiritualism? And let us recollect that the Apostles’ Creed from which this is taken was as much a standard with our Pilgrim Fathers as the Cambridge Platform.
If we look back to Cotton Mather’s Magnalia, we shall find that the belief in the ministration of angels and the conflict of invisible spirits, good and evil, in the affairs of men, was practical and influential in the times of our fathers.
If we look at the first New England Systematic Theology, that of Dr. Dwight, we shall find the subject of Angels and Devils and their ministry among men fully considered.
In the present theological course at Andover that subject is wholly omitted. What may be the custom in other theological seminaries of the present day we will not say.
We will now show what the teaching and the feeling of the primitive church was on the subject of the departed dead and the ministrations of angels. In Coleman’s Christian Antiquities, under the head of Death and Burial of the Early Christians, we find evidence of the great and wide difference which existed between the Christian community and all the other world, whether Jews or heathen, in regard to the vividness of their conceptions of immortality. The Christian who died was not counted as lost from their number—the fellowship with him was still unbroken. The theory and the practice of the Christians was to look on the departed as no otherwise severed from them than the man who has gone to New York is divided from his family in Boston. He is not within the scope of the senses, he can not be addressed, but he is the same person, with the same heart, still living and loving, and partners with them of all joys and sorrows.
But while they considered personal identity and consciousness unchanged and the friend as belonging to them, as much after death as before, they regarded his death as an advancement, an honor, a glory. It was customary, we are told, to celebrate the day of his death as his birth-day—the day when he was born to new immortal life. Tertullian, who died in the year 220 in his treatise called the Soldier’s Chaplet, says: “We make anniversary oblations for the dead—for their birth-days,” meaning the day of their death. In another place he says, “It was the practice of a widow to pray for the soul of her deceased husband, desiring on his behalf present refreshment or rest, and a part in the first resurrection,” and offering annually for him oblation on the day of his falling asleep. By this gentle term the rest of the body in the grave was always spoken of among Christians. It is stated that on these anniversary days of commemorating the dead they were used to make a feast, inviting both clergy and people, but especially the poor and needy, the widows and orphans, that it might not only be a memorial of rest to the dead, but a memorial of a sweet savor in the sight of God.