For some years now there has been a movement in England to introduce cremation as a method of disposing of the dead. There can be no doubt of its sanitary superiority to burial; there can be no doubt that, as far as reason and argument go, cremation should be preferred to the grave. There seems to be absolutely no good reason to bring forward in favour of the latter. And yet cremation makes no way. Men die and they are buried, and if over their tombs we do not now write "Hic jacet," but "In memory of," our ideas have suffered no change.
We cannot bear to burn the bodies of the dead because we cannot disassociate the body from the soul. The body is to rise, and if we burn it, what then? What will there be to rise? Man has but one body and one soul dwelling therein, and if you destroy the body the soul is dead too.
Only people who believe in the transmigration of souls burn their dead—the Hindus and, in Burma, the monks of Buddha. They see no objection to the destruction of the body because the soul is migratory, and has passed into another. What is left after death is but the "empty shell."
Therefore do Hindus and Buddhists cremate, whereas Christians and Mahommedans bury. Nor does rejection of creed alter this instinct. Intellectual France boasts of its freedom from religion. But is it free? Has it outgrown the instincts that are the root of religion? One certainly it has not yet done, for secularists are buried just as believers are, usually with the same rites. And even if the funeral be secular, the body is buried, not burnt. Why do they shrink from cremation if reason is to be the only guide? The creed is outworn but the roots of faith are never dead.
CHAPTER XXIX.
OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM.
Thus are the heavens of all religions explanations to materialise, as it were, the vague instincts of men's hearts. The Mahommedan's absolutely material garden of the houris, the Christian semi-material heaven, the Buddhist absolutely immaterial Nirvana, are all outcomes of the people's capability of separating soul from body. These heavens are just as the dogmas of Godhead, or Law, or Atonement, but the theory to explain the fact, which is in this case the desire for immortality. And in exactly the same way as the theories of other matters are unsatisfying, so are these theories of heaven. The desire for immortality is there, one of the strongest of all the emotions; but the ideal which the theologian offers to the believer to fulfil his desire has no attraction. The more it is defined the less anyone wants it. Heaven we would all go to, but not that heaven. The instinct is true, but the theory which would materialise the aim of that desire is false. No heaven that has been pictured to any believer is desirable.
It is strange to see in this but another instance of the invincible pessimism of the human reason. No matter to what it turns itself it is always the same.