“When a man,” they said, “has departed this life, to pronounce upon his condition in another world, or to pray that that condition may be altered, we regard as presumptuous, and especially unsuitable in a Christian congregation assembled for a religious purpose.”
Their cemeteries are never contiguous to their places of ordinary religious worship, nor within any of their towns or villages; but at some little distance, and generally within, or adjoining, some park or other public pleasure-ground. They imagined it must be deleterious to the health of the Europeans to inhabit towns, the site of which consists in great measure of stratum upon stratum of decomposing animal matter, continually renewed and continually stirred up.
“We are well aware,” they said, “what gave rise to the practice. It was the notion entertained by our ancestors (and, it should seem, by some of their European descendants) that demons are scared away by the sound of church-bells, by lustrations of holy-water, and the like; and that the departed, accordingly, derive from such things some kind of comfort and protection. We hold, however, (and we hoped our European brethren had long since come to the same conclusion,) that the only injuries of which a corpse is in any danger are from the plough or the spade, the carrion-crow, the swine, or the wolf;” (so they call the Dingo, the New Holland wild dog;) “and that protection from these is to be found in stone walls, boards, and mounds of earth, not in any religious ceremonies.
“As for spiritual danger, we conceive that the body becomes exempt from everything of that kind, precisely at the moment life departs from it; and, accordingly, that religious appliances then employed resemble the practice of the savages, who clothe the dead body of a friend in the best skin robes they can procure, and bury it, surrounded with a store of food, and with all the implements of hunting and fishing. If these poor heathens were to go a step beyond this in absurdity,—if they were to refuse to supply a famished companion while living with needful food, clothing, and shelter, and then, as soon as he was dead, and no longer sensible of cold and hunger, were to begin to supply his dead body with provisions, which it could no longer use,—they would then be treating him, as some of our European forefathers treated themselves; who seldom or never, during their lives, frequented a house of worship to any profitable purpose, while they might have derived benefit from their attendance; but reflected with satisfaction on the idea that their dead bodies would be brought into the house of worship, and perhaps interred there, as soon as the time should have passed when their presence there would be of any avail.
“It is partly in order to guard against any relapse into such superstitions that we make it a rule never even to bring a dead body within the walls of a place of worship.”
There are no monuments in their burial-grounds beyond plain slabs, containing the name of the person whose remains are interred, with the necessary dates, &c. But in other places they have monuments of the nature of cenotaphs, in memory of persons who have been in any manner so distinguished as to be allowed this posthumous honour, by the direction, or with the permission, of the civil authorities.
Statues are sometimes erected, in places of public resort, to men of high eminence: but usually the memorial consists in an inscription (sometimes accompanied with decorative sculpture) placed on the house in which the person in question was born, or lived, or died; or on any public building, such as a college, or library, or the like, which was in any way connected with his useful labours. In all cases, any monument so placed as to meet the public eye, cannot be erected without the permission of the proper authorities; whose approval of the inscription, decorations, and all the particulars, is essentially requisite.
“If a man chooses,” said they, “to erect within his own private house or garden the most extravagant mausoleum in honour of some ancestor, and to cover it with inscriptions of the most fulsome and groundless panegyric, he is quite at liberty to do so. We do not profess to make laws to prevent a man from playing the fool in private; but whatever is obtruded on the public eye is fairly placed under public control. And monuments,” they added, “when thus duly regulated, constitute a useful kind of record of departed worth, and of the several degrees and kinds of it; the utility of which record would be greatly impaired if mixed up and interlined, as it were, with the aberrations of the private partiality, or ostentation, or absurdity of individuals.
“It is the same,” they said, “with titles of honour, and decorations of office borne by the living. If a man has a fancy to wear in private a dressing-gown decorated like a robe of state,—to have his easy-chair in his study made after the fashion of a regal throne,—to make his own family in private call him your lordship or your majesty, or to amuse himself at his own home with any such folly, the laws would not take cognizance of his harmless absurdities; but if he were to do all this in public, he would not be allowed thus to go about to break down all distinctions of rank, dignity, and office, by assuming what did not belong to him. Now, we consider that monumental honours, when displayed before the public, are a kind of public posthumous dignities; over which, accordingly, the Public has a just right of control.”