BISHOP 'WORDSWORTH ON CRFMATION.
BISHOP WORDSWORTH, in his' sermon at -Westminster Abbey last Sunday against Cremation, can hardly -have meant, indeed certainly did not .mean, that the persecutors of the-early Christian martyrs, who, in the second century, burnt their bodies and scattered their ashes into the Tiber, interfered in any way with the resurrection of those bodies, in whatever sense the doctrine of the Church teaches that resurrection, from the dead. No doubt •what he did mean to say was, not that cremation would prevent the resurrection of the bodies of the persons :burnt, — a view that would be 'far more pagan than any ever suggested by the most flagrant sceptics, since it would imply that man, by a particular funeral rite, could cheat God of his purposes,—but •that it would restore a pagan kind of contempt for the body, and all that is connected with the body, —a contempt hardly reconcilable with the general temper of Christian affections. We do not suppose that, in the present day, even Dr. Wordsworth can imagine that the 'very body existing at the' moment of death can • be raised again in another world,— since it appears to be demonstrable that the same physical con- stituents-have entered into thousands and thousands of human bodies. And it would be making sacred things simplyricliculous, to maintain 'that a community of corporeal rights could exist (say) between the persons of the -saved and 'the persons of the condemned,—that portions of the same limb might be visited with extreme sufferings in a place of punishment, and yet minister to the sense of blessedness of another owner of it, in a world of blessedness. Nor; indeed, if-Dr; Wordsworth did-hold so absurd a tenet, would he have any greater difficulty on that account in accepting the rite of cremation. If every one is to reclaim his own earthly body, it would be neither more nor less difficult to do so after the sort of redistribution of its elements which is accomplished by fire, than after the sort of redistribution which is accomplished .by decay. Decomposition resolves the body as surely into completely new material forms, gaseous, fluid, and solid, as cremation. If the old body is to be fetched together from the elements once more, it would be quite an easy after combustion and the reassimilation by trees and plants and animals which would follow combustion, as it would be after de- composition and the reassimilation by trees, plants, and animals which would follow decomposition. Dr. Wordsworth is not so simple but that.he knows this. His sermon was not preached in alarm at any obstruction which the new proposal would be likely to offer to the promises and purposes of God, but evidently in fear lest, it should cultivate a new way of looking at things amongst men, which would make it more difficult to believe in the doctrine of immortality, and especially, it would appear, in the doctrine of a bodily resurrection.
And if, as we do not doubt, this was .the Bishop of Lincoln's meaning, his view is at least intelligible, however little credit it may da to the depth of our. Christian. convictions. It cannot be doubted that anything which interferes with religious customs, which changes or breaks. up the customary channels in which awe and reverence have hitherto been accustomed to run, does tend to loosen the hold of merely customary faiths upon the mind; and we interpret the Bishop of Lincoln's cry of alarm as being a pathetic way of saying to us,—' For God's sake, don't break up any. religious custom, on grounds however weighty ; if you do, you will be dissolving the only spiritual beliefs, we have,—for of earnest, individual conviction, based on the experi- ence and thoughts of our own time, there is so exceedingly little, so infinitely little, that if once we part with the traditionary faith we have inherited from our fathers, we shall lose our- selves in , the desert of unbelief.' That seems to us, virtually, the drift of the Bishop's warning. He doubts if the faith of the day in immortality can bear the shock of seeing the bodies of our friends treated merely as " matter in the wrong place," and re- duced to ashes. before our eyes. It may be very true that " the body is not the body which shall be ;" but yet respect for the body "which shall be" implies, he thinks, a certain reverence and ten- derness towards the body which is. If, instead of hiding from ourselves, as we now do, the slow process by which the mortal frame returns to the elements, we. hasten that process, and make it visible to the eyes of all ; if we leave no spot on the earth to which. our. memory can cling as that which contains the earthly form of the friend we have lost, some of the chief props and aids to the weak. human faith in immortality will be removed, though they may not be and are not the supports of . it, In a word, .revolutionise in any marked, way the traditional habits of men at those times in their lives when their minds are turned towards the supernatural, world, and you run a great risk of forcing on them anew difficulties which have hitherto been slid over, and causing faith itself to fall in along with the buttresses by which its infirmity has.hitherto been supported.
Now if all this be so,—and we are not sure that there may. not be something., natural in the Bishop's alarm,—it is the severest re- flection on the superficiality and poverty of Christian faith which can well.be imagined. Surely by this time at least, Christianity should have ceased to be dependent on the mere atmosphere of social usage, for one of its cardinal faiths, should be able to dispense-with any form of burial sincerely believed on good grounds- to be hurtful' to the health of the living gene- ration, and should be found equal to moulding the new form, whatever it may be, so as to 'represent with equal -dis- tinctness the old faith. If it cannot do this, it must have lost all its. living hold on the heart of society, and itself need a regenerating change. It is, no doubt, perfectly true that just as the human body itself sometimes mouldera away with- out any visible change in- its outward aspect, till at a touch or a breath of air it suddenly crumbles into dust, so a great faith, will manage to keep up all its old dignity and majesty of appearance till some trifling disturbance tests its reality, and you find. it suddenly vanishing beneath a touch. But surely that is not so now with the Christian faith, and it is hardly the sign of: an earnest individual faith in Dr. Wordsworth. himself to teach so strenuously that it. may be so. There is much superficial and much insincere. Christian profession,. but it is. hardly credible that any, large number of men would-be made pagans- by the custom of cremation, if for sanitary reasons it were ever introduced. No doubt, there would be a natural enough shrinking from the new duty ; a feeln ing that there was a want of tenderness in thus suddenly and absolutely expunging all trace of the vanished life from the earth. But just such shrinkings there are already from all kinds of duties, which the spirit of Christianity not only does not forbid, but is usually believed strictly to enjoin,—from war, for instance, in a good cause,—from using the sword in defence of civil order, from submissiveness of behaviour to a civil power really anti-Christian, in all things not positively unlawful. Chris- tianity in all its more solid forms has always shown, as an Evan,- gelical preacher once said of Providence, "great strength of mind." It has never been tender to srualLscruples. It has never doubted that it had sufficient inherent power in itself to find the means of reversing a mere current of artificial association;. nay, more, that it had the resources to encounter even a real moral paradox, like the extremely pacific and apparently" non-resistance" tendency of much of our Lord's teaching, without fearing that the paradox would be too much for the spirit thus encountering it. To think of the change from our present customs of burial to those which were common in the pagan world as likely to cause any difficulty of this- order would be quite absurd. If Christianity is as full of life now as we believe it to be, it would soon make cremation,—sup- posing cremation to be really recommended by the humane respect for human health,--as Christian a rite as inhumation has ever been ; and it would even profit by its courage to insist on the sacrifice of a mere sentiment of delicacy towards the dead, however keen and natural, in the cause of the health and happiness. of the living. The whole question is one for the science of , the- country to decide, and nothing can be more derogatory to the, vigour of Christianity, than to represent it as identified in any way with the present system of burial.
If it be as Bishop Wordsworth thinks, then, all we can say is that Christianity has lost altogether its initiative, its moulding force, its- power of putting a new heart into an old thing,1 and adapting itself to the changes- of the- world and the• ex- pansion of human knowledge. The Bishop's dread that some, change in the mere outward costume of faith may destroy, faith is as old as timid hearts and hesitating mind&. St. Peter was half ashamed of the new• practice of eating:- with the Gentiles, and had to be withstood by his brother Apostles "to the face," before he could get over his dread that the die. continuance of Jewish exclusiveness would endanger the young Christian Church, So, again,, it was supposed, at the,time of the revival of learning, that Christianity must collapse; before, the renewed study of the old pagan thought,—whereas Christianity won new conquests by her use of the spoils. Again, when thenew science came into being, and it appeared that the sun and not the earth was the centre of our system, it was feared that notions.° re- mote from those of the old prophets and Hebrew chroniclers would subvert the religion with which-scientific, error had been mixed, p. But once more the erroneous character of those faint-hearted an- ticipations, was proved, and Christianity found itself more power- ful than ever, though it had to alter its language• in relation. to the character of Hebrew inspiration. And now we are told that the mere change of a funeral rite,—a change which, if it had to be made, would not be accompanied by any change, however small, in the conceptions of the Church as to the destiny, of man, or even as, to the dignity of , the human, body,—indeed, the change would be one made in homage to. the dignity, of the living body,—would be fatal to the greatest article. in the .Christian creed, so far, as it affects human life and destiny. Surely the Bishops need not regard it, as some of them almost appear to do, as their official duty to utter such evil auguries for the Church of which they are supposed to be the guides: Surely fainter hearts can hardly be conceived than the hearts of those who think that the faith in a life beyond the grave will be dissipated by any attempt so to deal with the remains of the dead as to prevent their being a legacy of evil to the living? We, for our parts, are not yet satisfied that the men of science have shown a source of danger so serious now and so capable of complete elimination, as to recommend the change, and to justify the distress which at first it must cause. But clearly it is a question for science. And ecclesiastics who tell us that, if science shows it to be humane and a new security for health and strength, Christianity will sink beneath the shock,—only betray their own unconscious fear that the career of Christianity is nearly over, and its vital strength exhausted, or they would never dream of its succumbing to so petty an alarm as this.
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