Incomplete death, or trance, as it is called, stands midway between death and life. During this state the senses cannot receive impressions; they are inactive, paralyzed, as it were. Yet the spark of life is still there and can, under proper care, be retained until the natural condition is restored. Yet almost always trance ends through ignorance and carelessness in complete death.
It is an established fact that there is no certain sign of death, none but the beginning of decomposition. To prevent premature burial the body must be retained until the commencement of decay is visible. Incineration protects from the horrors of burial alive. Even if a person in a trance should be introduced into a cremation furnace, the intense heat to which the body would be subjected would extinguish life immediately and painlessly.
It is alleged by some who are more impressed by prejudice than reason, that cremation is heathenish, brutish, pagan, atheistic,—in short, contrary to Christian practice.
This I deny! To be sure the heathen did practice it,—the ancient Asiatics (Oriental peoples in general), Romans, Greeks, Teutons, and Etruscans,—but at the same time they executed grave-burial; and yet I have never heard anybody decry the latter as abominable, disgusting, and heathenish. It must be kept in mind, that the first Christians were compelled by their heathen persecutors to adopt burial. They were forced to inter their dead secretly in the catacombs; they could not, even if they had chosen to, burn their dead, as the smoke from the cremation pyre would have betrayed them.
Why inhumation should have become so universal among the Christians, that it is looked upon as a necessary part of the religion, and all other means of disposal of the dead as heathenish, is not entirely plain. There is no condemnation of cremation in any of the dogmatic teachings of the apostles. The early Christians, whether in Judæa, Greece, or Rome, were mainly of the poorer classes, who had to bury their dead. The mere fact that the richer and more educated classes, who were the most difficult to proselytize, universally practiced cremation would probably cause that custom to be associated with their other heathenish practices.
The Romans regarded the early Christians as a new sect of the Jews and called them “Nazarenes.” And, in fact, Christianity was born of Judaism; for Jesus, the founder, himself says (Matthew v. 17): “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.” It is easy to understand how, being an offspring of Judaism, Christianity should adopt that method of disposing of the dead then prevalent among the Jews. At first, as Dean Stanley avers, the breach between the heathens and Christians was not an utter one. According to this great divine the early Christians inhumed in the same places as the heathens, and even painted and engraved upon the catacombs representations of the pagan gods. Later on the breach widened, however, and the Christians, as intimated above, were forced to bury their dead in seclusion.
It is alleged by some eminent writers on theological subjects that in the beginning Christians were even cremated.
Merivale, the historian, holds that letters inscribed on many of the Christian tombs in the catacombs imply that the early Christians sometimes burned their dead. Nevertheless, at the end of the fourth century Christians heard of burning with horror, and finally becoming inimical to the practice, although it was nowhere forbidden in the New Testament, made haste to abolish it in Europe.
THE BLACK AND WHITE JASPER URN.
(Barlow Collection.)