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to bring His glad gospel to the waiting souls. That was the first great missionary work of the Church. May we not reverently see His own anticipation of it in His departing words as He started on His mission,
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Father, into Thy hands do I commend My spirit (in the journey on which it is going). May we not read it in that
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not
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to the thief beside Him,
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To-day you shall be with Me in Paradise ? May we not dwell on the wonder and joy and gratitude and love which must have shaken that world within the veil, as the loving conqueror came in amongst them? And may we not reverently follow Him still in thought when He returned to earth and, as we conjecture, somewhere in the Forty Days after the Resurrection, told His disciples of His marvellous experience? I am not laying down this as a statement of Scripture, but I think it is a fair conjecture, for how else could they have learned it? And if we are right; think how the knowledge of it would swell the glad confidence of St. Paul.
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For I am persuaded that neither DEATH, nor LIFE, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, is able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
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Why, then, is it new in our day? The answer is easy. At the Reformation time there were terrible abuses connected with the Church's doctrine of the Intermediate life. The practice of purchased Masses, and Pardons, and Indulgences, and all the absurdities connected with the Roman purgatory, so exemplified in Tetzel's cry,
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When money clinks at the bottom of my box a soul is released from purgatory. With such provocation one does not wonder--though one may greatly regret--that the indignant reformers, in sweeping away the falsehood, sometimes swept away also the underlying truth. The teaching about the Intermediate Life, and the old practice of the Church in remembering her faithful departed in prayer, were all put in the background as leading to dangerous abuse; and so the people, getting no real teaching about it, got the sad habit of trying to forget about the state of their dear ones departed. In their ignorance, they could only guess blindly what the Creed here means. So for centuries this has been the