Dr. H. Erichsen:
Dear Sir,—In reply to your request that I should write an introduction to a work which you are about to compose on cremation, I am placed in the great difficulty of knowing nothing of your book, not even having seen its title-page or table of contents. It is quite impossible, therefore, for me to say how far your views and my own may accord. But, as I suppose your object is to bring before the people of America proof of the evil effects to the living inseparable from the present mode of disposal of the dead by burying them in the earth, as well as to show how these evils may be avoided by burning dead bodies,—in a word, by the substitution of cremation for burial, of purification for putrefaction,—I have great pleasure in doing the little that is in my power to assist in bringing a very important question of sanitary reform before a thoughtful, intelligent, and advancing nation.
I do not know how far I am right in supposing that with you in the West, as with us in the East, a knowledge of sanitary science, of the conditions which are necessary for the health of mankind, is still confined to the comparatively few who may be called the well educated class. Nor do I know how far this knowledge has been diffused among the classes of your population who have received but little education. But I do know with us it is the highest classes, in the sense of the best educated classes, who are the most earnest in their efforts to disseminate that branch of knowledge or science which, in the words of Parkes, aims at rendering “youth most perfect, decay less rapid, life more vigorous, and death more remote.” Parkes is dead, but he still speaks to us by his book, and he says:—
“The disposal of the dead is always a question of difficulty. If the dead are buried, so great at last is the accumulation of bodies that the whole country round a great city becomes gradually a vast cemetery. After death, the buried body returns to its elements. If, instead of being buried, the body is burned, the same process occurs more rapidly. A community must always dispose of its dead, either by burial in land or water, or by burning, or chemical destruction equivalent to burning, or by embalming or preserving. The eventual dispersion of our frame is the same in all cases. Neither affection nor religion can be outraged by any manner of disposal of the dead which is done with proper solemnity and respect to the earthly dwelling-places of our friends. The question should be entirely placed on sanitary grounds. Burying in the ground appears certainly to be the most insanitary plan.”
Parkes died before we had learned how perfectly and cheaply, how rapidly and inoffensively cremation could be carried on; and he favored burying in the sea rather than in the earth, whenever the distance was not too great for transport. He knew well how impossible it is to prevent graveyards within towns, or suburban cemeteries, from becoming sooner or later a source of danger or nuisance to the living, how difficult it is to find a suitable site and soil, sufficient space, and to secure proper regulations and management. These difficulties may not be so great amid your unlimited space as with us; but they must be an increasing evil in and around your large cities. I trust, therefore, that your work may assist in the more rapid progress of cremation as a substitute for burial.
With us the legal objection has ceased. It is now acknowledged by the government, and has been decided by three judges that if cremation is so performed as to create no nuisance, and incite to no breach of the peace, it is not illegal.
The religious objection has been answered by the Bishop of Manchester, by Canon Liddon, and by the Earl of Shaftesbury. The bishop said: “No intelligent faith can suppose that any Christian doctrine is affected by the manner in which this mortal body of ours crumbles into dust and sees corruption.”
Canon Liddon said, in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral:—
“The resurrection of a body from its ashes is not a greater miracle than the resurrection of an unburnt body; each must be purely miraculous.”