Or might it not happen that the dead, like the living, could be unfaithful:-- "Is death's long kiss a richer kiss Than mine was wont to be, Or have you gone to some far bliss And straight forgotten me ?" Perhaps Jenny already loved another in heaven, and his gift of faithfulness might some day be a burden to her...
This love of death was no mere morbid absorption.

It was but one of the activities of a faithfulness to which the trees about the temple had become "dear as the temple's self," and his jealousy for those honours paid to death was only one expression of his eager watchfulness for the signs of human faithfulness.
Not all unrewarded was that watch.

The world held some faithful hearts,--let us not ask how many,--lovers of invisible faces and voices heard no more, men and women who still shared their joys and sorrows with unseen comrades, and drank the cup of life as a sacrament of remembrance.
This sharing with the dead seemed to Theophil the essential of faithfulness,--faithfulness taking many forms, sometimes maybe misrepresentative of itself, and seldom perhaps informing its conventional externals.
A time will come in the profoundest griefs when those rituals to which young grief is so eager to vow itself will grow lifeless and conventional, the daily tasks of remembrance become as the told beads of pattered prayers.

Let the worshipper of relics beware lest his treasures some day turn on his hands to so much irksome lumber, and true sorrow be thus humiliated.
No! the service for the dead which is most likely to remain a vital offering of the heart is not the ceremonial sorrow of specially consecrated times and seasons, but rather the simple longing in hours of joy that _they_ could have been with us.

To think of our dead friends as always in their shrouds is a way of remembrance which we shall not long have heart or even interest to follow.