THE BISHOP OF LINCOLN ON CREMATION. (Standard, July 7.)

Waikato Times, Volume VII, Issue 369, 24 September 1874, Page 2

THE BISHOP OF LINCOLN ON CREMATION. (Standard, July 7 .)

It has been often said, and said by men not deficient in reverence for the clergy or for the sacred mysteries of which they are the especial custodians, that it would be very well for our professional preachers to have to listen, once and again, to a sermon preached for their especial benefit by a layman and a man of the world. And no text h;is more often presented itself to the minds of those who have desired to preach to the preachers than the story of the bringing down of the ark into the camp of Israel, under the high-priesthood of Eli. The moral is plain enough ; and yet the mistake is one which priests Jewish, pagan, and Christian — have repeated over and over again, from the days of Hophni and Phineas even to our own. It is with peculiar regret that we see it committed by a prelate so deservedly distinguished for learning, piety, and Christian wisdom as the Bishop of Lincoln, and yet never was the ark brought down with a clearer absence of all warranty or adequate occasion, and with a more obvious danger of the usual result, than in last Sunday's sermon at Westminster Abbey. Cremation or burial is, one would have thought, an issue most purely and obviously secular, though it involves, no doubt, prejudices and customs which are to many as a part of their religion, and though it is impossible to touch in any way feelings so deep and associations so sacred as those which in nearly every land, and tinder almost every religion, are connected with the last disposal of the dead without exciting fierce opposition among those who are governed by sentiment rather than by logic, and especially among those who are more earnest in attachment to their faith than learned in its historical foundations, or skilled to (liKcern its accidents from its essentials The Bishop denounces cremation as an essentially barbarous and un-Christian practice, and allows it j to be inferred, at least, that a community which should take to burning, instead of burying, its dead, would Ikia c made a retrograde step not only in civilization but in religion. We are bound, without expressing any opinion in favour of cremation, to say plainly that this seems altogether incorrect. The most civilized nations of the Old World burned their dead, and that not simply to save the corpse from the possibility of hostile molestation, but in time of peaco as a means of getting rid of the unendurable and preserving the harmless portion of the remains. Nor is it ti ue that the dead were commonly in danger of insult from an enemy. The most sacred law of Avar among the Greeks was that which required that the dead should be given up for funeral ceremonies at the request of the defeated party, and the only instance we can remember in which that law was violated was one in which the victors offered to give up the dead if the vanquished would comply with another rule and abandon a temple which they had turned into a fortress. The Greeks and Romans, nt the height of civilization, burned their dead. Christian nations, in the depth of mediaeval barbarism, burned them j so little is tho mode of sepulture an evidence of civilization. The Brahmins, the most civilized race of the East, and the branch of tho Aryan tribe which remained nearest to the seats of their forefathers, burned their dead when their history began, and burn them now. There are climates in which burial would be highly dangerous, and others in which, being practised, it necessitates so hasty a disposal of all corpses, that the most awful of all calamities, tho burial of those who arc yet living, is by no means an unfrequont incidont. We must say that a man like the Bishop of Lincoln abuses his well-earned influence and authority when he strives to represent burning as a barbarous, and burial as essentially a civilized practice It is truo that burial was at a very early period, if not from the first, a Christian practice. Bat why t We beliovo there Avero many reasons, no one of which hits any piesent weight. First, cremation was in those days an expensive process as compaicd with in torment, and the Christians chiefly belonged l> the poorest classes. Second i .-, cremation could

liaiilly bo pi necked n private, and therefore a body burnt could not bo con.signed to its last re.it with the distinctive rites cf the Church, whoso assemble s were always liable to be broken up by the Liutors or Praetorians. Thirdly, the Chribtiiin.s h.id adopted many Jewish ideas from the Apostles ; and burial was it, Jewish practice, as tho bishop has elaborately reminded us. Lastly, the Christians' remembered that the practice of burial was closely connected with the last and greatest of their Master's miracles —the crowning stone of the edifice of the faith— the physical resurrection of the Saviour ; and as they in the earliest ages looked daily for his coming, probably many or most of them thought that thenbodies, if buried, might be restored incorrupt at His second coming, with the very flesh and bones that were laid in the grave. None of these motives ought to influence us. The sacred corpse was not allowed to remain in the grave. We know that our bodies must remain there, probably till they moulder to atoms, and till those atoms enter, as the atoms forming the bodies of Polycarp and, Paul have done, into grass, into animal flesh, and, again, into other human bodies. And this brings us to the most unfortunate of the bishop's statements. He tells us that cremation would destroy the faith of mankind in the resurrection of the body. But how ? He does not, certainly, mean to tell us that there would be any more marvel or difficulty in the bodily resurrection of a burnt than of a buried corpse. He does not suppose that the risen body is formed of the same material that formed the last earthly body ; for he knows that the same materials have entered into several bodies He rfemembers that St Paul tells us that the body that is raised differs essentially from that which is " sown." He cannot mean, then, that if cremation were univei-sally adopted it would make the resurrection of the body one whit less time or real thau it is now. He must mean that the majority now believe it on wholly delusive grounds, forgetting tho unseen pi'ocess of decay, and fancying that the actual body committed to the ground lies there unaltered till the last day — a delusion which cremation would dispel. Would he wish, then, to perpetuate a custom because it induces people to believe a true doctrine on false grounds and in a false sense ? Cremation can do nothing to disturb any belief in the resurrection of the body which is not essentially false already. We neither wish to exalt cremation nor to disparage the bishop, but we are bound to say that the sermon of Sunday evening tends to do both.