I have always been of the opinion that a great many clergymen fear to state their real views concerning cremation, lest their congregation might discharge them and engage the services of some other theologian; and I still have the same impression.
The so-called religious objection to cremation is wholly unsound, as even a great many anti-cremationists admit; it is therefore not surprising that “religious” opposition is fast weakening and waning wherever it has existed at all.
A late writer in the Church Review advises us to take care that incineration does not fall into infidel hands, and so become at last a symbol of irreligion.
The cemetery is regarded, in general, as a permanent resting-place of the dead, where they may sleep undisturbed. Man of the present time puts his beloved into the dirty, dark ground, and hands them over to the foul putrefaction; he places upon their graves large, heavy monuments, as if to keep them down and prevent them from finding their way back again into this sinful world. But he thinks not of the festering mass of corruption hid away under the tombstone; to him the departed is more like one asleep, like he or she was when death claimed the mortal body. He fondly imagines that his dear ones shall remain there forever, that their quiet rest shall be unbroken. From year to year, however, bodies are added to those already buried, the disgusting state of overcrowding which I described minutely, with all its evils, shows itself, and then one of two things happens: either the remains of those buried before are ruthlessly dug up by the sexton’s spade and thrown into the mud whenever a new grave is made, or all of the bodies are exhumed and taken away; the soil is parcelled, and the new generation takes possession of the “city of the dead.”
In some cemeteries corpses are allowed to remain in a grave only a stipulated time; in English burial-grounds, where a freehold right is not secured, the remains may rest undisturbed but seven, in France five, years.
The sentiment of the public is expressed in the sequent extract from a lecture by the Rev. Brooke Lambert:—
“There is no subject on which people feel more deeply than the disturbance of the remains of their ancestors, and even the displacement of effete memorials of them. I find that the prevailing feeling is that the dead ought never to be removed, nor the position of their monuments changed even by a hair’s breadth. Now whilst our present system of burial remains, such changes in their places of interment must occur.”
When Mr. Walker, the surgeon, inspected the Portugal Street Cemetery at London, England, on April 27, 1839, he discovered that two graves had been opened, the bones of the remains exposed to view; and a lot of coffin-wood, some quite fresh, intended (as he was informed) for firewood.
A gentleman who visited the same burial-ground some time before (vide Times, June 25, 1838) wrote: “I was shocked to see two men employed in carrying baskets of human bones to the back of the ground through a small gate. I have 12 of my nearest and dearest relatives consigned to the grave in that ground, and I felt that I might perhaps at that moment be viewing, in the basket of skulls which passed before me, those of my own family thus brutally exhumed.”
A correspondent to the Weekly Despatch, of September 30, 1838, thus describes St. Giles’ Churchyard, where he had just been:—