In praying for saints, we must be careful to comprehend and encircle all saints. I do not mean, as the Papists, for quick and dead. Prayer is a means to wait upon them in their way; at death, then they are at their journey’s end. Prayers are bootless for the dead sinner, and needless for the deceased saint. The wicked in that state are beneath, the saint above, our prayers. We cannot help the wicked. The tree is fallen, and so it must lie. We read of a change the body shall have after death. Vile bodies may, but filthy souls cannot, after death be made glorious. If they go off the body filthy, so they shall meet it at the resurrection. The time to pray for them is now while they live among you, or never; for death and hell come together to the sinner. No sooner Dives’ wretched soul is forced out of his body, but you hear it shriek in hell, ‘The rich man also died, and was buried; and in hell he lift up his eyes, being in torment,’ Luke 16:22, 23. But Abraham tells him ‘there is a gulf fixed,’ that forbids all intercourse betwixt heaven and him. No what is that but an irrevocable decree with which the wicked are sealed under everlasting wrath?
If God receive no prayers from them, then not from others for them. And as the wicked are beyond our help, so the saints above all need of our help; for they are in their port and haven. Prayer implies want, but saints departed are perfect, called therefore ‘the spirits of just men made perfect.’ We need not beg a pardon for them, for the Lord acquits them—they are ‘just;’ not for a supply of any good they want, they are ‘made perfect;’ not to remove any pain they feel, for ‘the Spirit saith, Blessed are they that die in the Lord, they rest from their labours.’ But they who invented this device intended, it is like, gain to their own purse, rather than benefit to others’ souls. It is a pick‑purse doctrine, contrived to bring grist to the pope’s mill. But, to leave this, they are the living saints, your companions here in tribulation, that are the subject of your prayers, and of these we are to encircle the whole community within our remembrance. The Papists speak much of a treasury the church hath. This indeed is the true treasury of the church—the common stock of prayers with which they all trade to heaven for one another. Paul tells us what a large heart he had, even for those whose ‘face he never saw in the flesh,’ Col. 1:2. Take a few reasons for the point.
