My dear friends, you had before your minds the answers to our question from the highest to the lowest earthly authorities. None of them was satisfactory. Now you have heard the testimony of God’s Word — the divine declaration as to “Where are the dead?” Harkening to the voice from heaven we are assured that they are really dead and that all their hopes as respects the future are centered, first upon the redemptive work of our Lord Jesus, accomplished at Calvary, and secondly, upon the work or resurrection which, at his second advent, he is to accomplish for those whom he redeemed. If perchance you have a shade of disappointment as respects a saintly brother or sister, father or mother or child who you hoped was already in heaven, then as a consolation look at the other side of the question — behold how many of your loved ones, kith and kin, friends and foes and neighbors, according to your theory and all the prevalent theories, have been suffering untellable woe since their death and would be suffering similarly for long centuries to come — consider the relief of mind and heart you get from the knowledge of the truth: that they are not alive anywhere, but simply dead, or more poetically, they are “Asleep in Jesus,” in the sense that he is their Redeemer, in whom all their hopes of a future awakening reside.