Wells Samuel Roberts - The Salem Witchcraft, the Planchette Mystery, and Modern Spiritualism стр 35.

says, also:

The sacrament of the Lords Supper was administered at funerals and often at the grave itself. By this rite it was professed that the communion of saints was still perpetuated between the living and the dead. It was a favorite idea that both still continued members of the same mystical body, the same on earth and in heaven. Antiq., p. 413.

St. Augustine says: Why should we disfigure ourselves with black, unless we would imitate unbelieving nations, not only in their wailing for the dead, but also in their mourning apparel? Be assured, these are foreign and unlawful usages.

He says, also: Our brethren are not to be mourned for being liberated from this world when we know that they are not om itted but pre mitted, receding from us only that they may precede us, so that journeying and voyaging before us they are to be desired but not lamented. Neither should we put on black raiment for them when they have already taken their white garments; and occasion should not be given to the Gentiles that they should rightly and justly reprove us, that we grieve over those as extinct and lost who we say are now alive with God, and the faith that we profess by voice and speech we deny by the testimony of our heart and bosom.

So really and truly did the first Christians believe that their friends were still one with themselves, that they considered them even in their advanced and glorified state a subject of prayers.

Prayer for each other was to the first Christians a reality. The intimacy of their sympathy, the entire oneness of their life, made prayer for each other a necessity, and they prayed for each other instinctively as they prayed for themselves. So, St. Paul says Always in every prayer of mine making request for you always with joy. Christians are commanded without ceasing to pray for each other. As their faith forbade them to consider the departed as lost or ceasing to exist, or in any way being out of their fellowship and communion, it did not seem to them strange or improper to yield to that impulse of the loving heart which naturally breathes to the Heavenly Father the name of its beloved. On the contrary, it was a custom in the earliest Christian times, in the solemn service of the Eucharist, to commend to God in a memorial prayer the souls of their friends departed , but not dead . In Colemans Antiquities , and other works of the same kind, many instances of this are given. We select some:

Arnobius, in his treatise against the heathen writers, probably in 305, speaking of the prayers offered after the consecration of the elements in the Lords Supper, says that Christians prayed for pardon and peace in behalf of the living and dead. Cyril,

of Jerusalem, reports the prayer made after consecrating the elements in Holy Communion in these words:

We offer this sacrifice in memory of those who have fallen asleep before us, first patriarchs, prophets, apostles, and martyrs, that God by their prayers and supplications may receive our supplications and those we pray for, our holy fathers and bishops, and all that have fallen asleep before us, believing it is of great advantage to their souls to be prayed for while the holy and tremendous sacrifice lies upon the altar.

The original idea with the primitive Christian was this: My friend is neither dead nor changed. He is only gone before me, and is promoted to higher joy; but he is still mine and I am his. Still can I pray for him, still can he pray for me; and as when he was here on earth we can be mutually helped by each others prayers.

Out of this root so simple and so sweet grew idolatrous exaggerations of saint worship and a monstrous system of bargain and sale of prayers for the dead. The Reformation swept all this away and, as usual with reformations, swept away a portion of the primitive truth but it retained still the Eucharistic memorial of departed friends as a fragment of primitive simplicity.

The Church, furthermore, appointed three festivals of commemoration of these spiritual members of the great Church Invisible with whom they held fellowship the festivals of All Souls, of All Angels, of All Saints.

Two of these are still retained in the Episcopal Church the feast of St. Michael and All Angels, and the feast of All Saints. These days are derived from those yearly anniversaries which were common in the primitive ages.

[Here we have a formal deprecation of the tendency of modern orthodoxy to withdraw from what was once regarded as a proper religious belief and sentiment, and which modern Spiritualists warmly accept, and make one of the chief grounds for their doctrine of intercommunication between the departed dead and the living. We expect to give our readers other papers by Mrs. Stowe in continuation of her discussion on the subject.

In the following letter, or extract from a letter, from Mr. Andrew Jackson Davis, one of the leading lights and exponents of Spiritualism at the present day, we have a voice from the inside , furnishing some information with regard to the state of spiritualistic affairs in America, and some of the expected results of the movement.]