such glad occasion. In fact, it is the province of poetry to select its themes, and not to describe the prosaic and every day, but, on the contrary, the exceptional and picturesque, as we now phrase it. We cannot quote poets as if they were statisticians, or rely on their descriptions as (with a view to' contingent practices) we rely on the agent's inventory when we let our house furnished for the season to a foreign family from South America with a large family of small children. If, for instance, one should take Virgil's thrilling narrative of the hapless Dido's funeral pyre au pied de la lettre, he would find himself beset with difficulties to which all the arithmetical objections to the Pentateuch of all possible Colensos are hardly comparable. No doubt there are traces of the practice of cremation in both East and West, and some of an early date; but these, such as the funeral rites of some tribes in the far East, and, in the West, of the Heruli, the Getæ, the Thracians, Sarmatians, &c., are mentioned as noteworthy exceptions to the general practice of mankind; and the circumstances accompanying them were usually such as denote races abnormally savage and degenerate.

Exceptional forms of disposing of the dead are to be found here and there in all ages; and our contention is that cremation, though a more obvious and less barbarous custom, is still to be classed with these. Thus the Parsees dispose of their dead by exposing them on lofty towers, protected by gratings from the birds of prey. The Scythians kept their dead affixed to lofty trees; the aborigines of Australia still hang them up in baskets. The Orinocos suspend them in running water till the flesh is consumed by fishes, and then inter the bones. The heathen tribes of Jakutsk dry and decorate the skeletons of their dead and keep them in their huts, says Le Bruyn. The Tapayas and some Mexa tribes grind the bones of the dead and mix them with their food. Perhaps a further advance in what some people call civilization may revive some of these practices. We shall see, further on, that some modern advocates of cremation advocate the utilization of dead men's bones. The process is condemned in Holy Scripture by the mouth of Amos the Prophet (ii. 1), but that is to such theorizers a matter of no moment. The influences of barbarism and those of an extreme but merely material civilization on the belief of mankind are not so dissimilar as a superficial observation of them might lead us to suppose, and in their results at least they not unfrequently illustrate in no small measure the saying that "extremes meet." Cremation is still practised by some Hindus and by one of the Tartar

tribes, at least as regards their princes. Whether or not the practice is commanded in the Védas, the cremation of widows on the funeral pyre of their husbands is not yet entirely extinct in British India, and the custom of immolating horses and slaves on the pyre of Tartar princes yet lingers in Central Asia. Thus, as regards the actuality of the situation (as the French say), it would seem, from recent pamphlets published in London, that the modern cremationist would at present mount his funeral pile with a Suttee on one side and a Kalmuck on the other: but we are anticipating. Let thus much suffice as a sketch of the early antecedents of cremation in general. If it is at all accurate, it would indicate that, whereas a general and most ancient consent of mankind to return their dead with reverend and religious care to the bosom of the earth was in possession for ages, as the rock tombs, barrows, pyramids, and other such sepulchral monuments, which are to be found in all lands, testify, a very partial, fitful, and obscure thread of exception to this rule appears in some countries and at some times; and those countries and times, moreover, appear as more or less conscious innovators on what went before. The last phase of the history of sepulture is the Christian era, and it would be no doubt at the present time a mere parade of unnecessary erudition were we to attempt to sketch that which all who care to know can and do know, and not even the most ardent cremationists affect to deny viz., that with Christianity set in a complete rejection and a growing horror of cremation, so that by the fourth century of the Christian era it had as completely disappeared as it has ever since. It would, indeed, have been astonishing if the practice of burning the dead had been otherwise than utterly abhorrent and repugnant to the mind of Christians. We know from the mouth of S. Peter,* speaking in the name of the whole Apostolic College, and of S. Paul,† his co-apostle to the Gentiles, that the whole Christian scheme of the redemption of man rests on the belief of the resurrection of the Incarnate Son of God in the identical body in which He died on the cross for man, and on the consequent doctrine of the general resurrection of all men in their self-same bodies in which they lived and sinned, or merited, through Christ, the awards of God's final and most just judgment. That those who would come to God must believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of those who seek Him," earnestly, is a truth contained within the verge of that natural religion on which is based the whole revealed truth of the Gospel of

* Acts i. 22.

† 1 Cor. xv. 17.

Heb. xi. 6.

Christ; and the rite of inhumation, and the various significant ceremonies with which the natural piety of different races accompanied that act, was a testimony of even the natural man to his natural belief in God, his first beginning and his final cause, in his own indestructible individuality, and in the doom of an eternity to come beyond the grave, of whose character his own conscience was at once the witness and the presage. Whatever of these momentous truths lingered upon earth even in Gentile lands, was not obscurely signified at those solemn vesper services of each expiring life of mortal man, and it was not likely only, but absolutely certain, that the unerring mind of the Spouse of Christ should prefer a practice still redolent of its primeval origin to one which had to plead for its existence and its sanction, at best some transient emergency, more often the sensual and spectacular tendencies of corrupting civilization, or the cruel pride of this world's princes, rejecting as beneath their dignity the common lowly lot of the dead, and immolating human victims on the funeral-pyre, if haply the terrors and the death-agony of slaves might supply the absence of a true compassion and the plaints of that affectionate regret of which they were so often unworthy.

But what rendered, and always will render, inhumation and not cremation, the Christian form of disposing of the dead is something more definite than this; it is, as we have said, the precise doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh. And here we may note, that it is in the mouth of Job,* according to that interpretation of his words which we ourselves follow, that we find the most explicit declaration of all the Scriptures on the subject of the resurrection of the flesh. Whether we hold the received opinion that Jobab, who appears in the list of the kings of Edom and descendants of Esau,† is the same person as Job or not, it is certain that he was a Gentile in this sense at least, that he was not one of that immediate chosen line to whom alone God made Himself known from time to time in a supernatural way. So that whatever you take from Job's authority as a direct witness of supernatural truth, you must give to him as an authentic witness of primeval natural tradition.

Our good friends and wellwishers, the cremationists, have not been slow to assert that Christians are averse to cremation because it brings before the very eyes of the vulgar a scientific truth, viz., that our material frames are reducible (and as a fact are reduced after death, sooner or later) into impalpable gases, which in their turn become the constituents of other

bodies, and so on to a practical infinity: and this truth, they are never tired of reiterating, is utterly irreconcilable with the Christian doctrine, that we shall rise again with the identical bodies which are now ours. We speak under correction, but we doubt whether any authority for such an idea as this Christian horror of scientific truth can be adduced. We quite think that uneducated minds might receive some kind of shock to their faith if the gas theory were thrust before them by this unnatural practice; nor do we the least doubt that it is in the hope of shaking popular belief in this article of the Christian creed that cremation has often been put forward. We have, however, never yet met with an ordinarily catechized Catholic Christian to whom this theory gave any more trouble than the other shallow objections of Protestants or Rationalists to such doctrines as that of Transubstantiation or the Real Presence. The faith teaches us that we rise again in our own (and only) bodies, as identical as our own personality itself, but so completely changed in all conditions of being, that no ratio of conflict, or of contact even, is conceivable between the laws of matter which regulate their condition in this world, and that spiritualized condition to which they will be admitted hereafter. S. Paul tells us, that there is an analogy between the relation of our body's temporary condition to its future and eternal condition, and that relation which exists of the seed of grain sown to the crop which springs again from it into new life; but he says also that he speaks of "a mystery," and everyone knows that, in the Christian phraseology, a "mystery" is that which cannot be explained in human language, or solved by human reason, because it transcends the one and the other. The four gifts which distinguish the state of the risen body from the same body before its resurrection abundantly testify that its conditions of being are totally different, and neither sense nor reason, without faith, can ever arrive at a conception of it. To the mind of a believer the fact that the object of belief is not clear to him, forms only an argument of his own ignorance, because the principle on which his belief rests is not the antecedent and subjective probability of each thing proposed to his acceptance, but the sufficient credibility of the witness who attests, that the object so to be received is a part of the revealed truth of God. The fact is, that the attempt to represent Catholics as averse to cremation on such religious grounds is part of the system of imputing to us a stupid materialism, which has been one of our adversaries' devices from the earliest times. The Pagans made it a subject of reproof to the early Christians: "execrantur rogos, et damnant ignium sepulturam"; but Minutius Felix, who wrote

in the beginning of the third century of our era, answered them, that it was from no foolish idea that the earth preserved the material remains of men better than any other mode of tumulation, but merely because it was the more ancient and the more advantageous system, that the Christians buried their dead. Incidentally he shows also that the practice of cremation was one introduced by military discipline: "Cremabitur," he asks (in his dialogue of Octavius, ch. xi.), "ex castrensi disciplina, Christianus cui cremari non licuit, cui Christus merita ignis indulsit? . . . non, ut creditis, ullum damnum sepulturæ timemus, sed et veterem et meliorem consuetudinem humandi frequentamus." Tertullian (de Anima, et de Resurrectione Carnis) assigns further the reason of affection and reverence for the dead, which is so natural and so Christian also, that Julian the Apostate (in his 49th letter) places it among the other causes to which he assigns the spread of Christianity. Certainly the doctrine that the very body of the Christian becomes the temple of the Holy Ghost, and is thus rendered sacred and consecrate to God, prompts to a reverent treatment of the dead; and no method of tumulation is so simply and practically respectful as that which consists in laying it to rest undisturbed and unmutilated by man in the bosom of that earth whence it was formed. S. Jerome incidentally mentions, that burial in the earth was the common practice in his age: "Fossam in humum lapidibus construentes, ex more tumulum parant," he says (Ep. xlix. ad Innoc.); and S. Ambrose (Ep. xxxix. ad Theodosium) says that it was not Christians only who thus buried, for that Diocletian "ita humatus est," which must have been a notorious fact.

It must, however, be noticed, that while inhumation is the general practice of the Christian Church, she has never followed the narrow-minded example of the "liberal " cremationists who wish to burn every body. The objectors to inhumation have laid great stress on the hygienic view of the matter. We believe that in exceptional cases only is cremation to be preferred to inhumation. Such a case would be the battle-field, in which thousands of bodies lie festering in their corruption at one time; or the plague-stricken city, decimated by the sudden onslaught of a fell epidemic. In these cases, as at Milan and elsewhere, the Church never hesitated to allow, and even to enjoin, whatever the exigency of the moment required in derogation of her ordinary rule, and to sanction the castrensis disciplina of which we have just heard. Nor have individual Christians shrunk, in the interests of religion, or even of science, from surrendering their bodies to any treat