And more than martyr in thy passionate woe!
How should thy sisters equal thee above,
Who knelt not with thee on the gory sod?
Or where the crown our worship could bestow
Like that long gold which wiped the feet of God?
God's Acre.
In all countries and in all creeds, the dead have claimed the affectionate notice of the living. The idea of housing them, deifying them, propitiating them, of remembering them in some way, however diverse, has always been a prominent one. The belief in the soul's immortality seems to have been even more clear to the ordinary mind of the natural man than that of a Supreme and Almighty Being. When Christianity appeared, the departed had a place assigned them among the members of the church, and were commemorated as absent brethren gone before their fellows one stage further on the last great journey; when the Reformation disfranchised human nature in the XVIth century, and levelled all its hallowed aspirations with the brute instincts of the animal kingdom, the dead, though divorced from communion with the living, were yet remembered, and placed in two categories—the elect, or the precondemned. Another life was even then believed in, and later branches of the reforming sects all condescended at least to theorize on the future state of disembodied spirits. It remained for our times to foster the cruel unbelief that dooms our loved ones, not even to everlasting perdition, but to absolute annihilation. It was hard enough in Puritan days for a pious though mistaken mind to bring itself to the belief that possibly the loved companion of childhood, the chosen mate of youth, the venerable parent, the upright teacher, was one of those predestined to eternal torments, one of the holocausts to the greater glory of God; but how far harder now for a fond heart, a clinging nature, to see in those it loves so many perishable puppets, without future and without hope! But happily there is a haven to which these storm-tossed souls may come with the precious freight of their love and their unerring Catholic instincts. Their companions and brethren are not gone into trackless chaos, they are not absorbed into that monstrous “nothing” of which a false philosophy has made a bewildering bugbear. Every year the church protests against such revolting doctrines on the day which she publicly consecrates to prayers for and remembrance of the departed. This festival is like a spiritual harvest-home; coming as it does just at the close of the ecclesiastical year, it marks an epoch in the life of the church suffering; and various “revelations” made to saints, as well as the collective belief of the faithful, agree in considering it a day of liberation and rejoicing among the souls in Purgatory. “God's Acre” (according to the touching and suggestive German idiom) is reaped on that auspicious day, though, like Boaz, the Divine Reaper leaves yet a few ears of corn to be gleaned into heavenly rest by the prayers of the faithful on earth.
Before we go further into our own beautiful view of the future life, let us stop to see how other races and religions have treated the dead.
Of the Egyptians, it is difficult to speak except at too great a length, and, not having at hand sufficient authority, we can only set down what [pg 267] our recollection will supply. The readers of The Catholic World will no doubt remember some interesting articles published a few months since regarding the ancient civilization of Egypt, in which copious reference was made to the esteem and respect paid to the dead in that country. The singular custom of pledging the embalmed body of a father or ancestor, on the receipt of a loan, was noticed; also the dishonor attaching to the non-redemption of such a pledge. A learned English author, speaking incidentally of Egyptian embalming, mentions that the word mummy is derived from “mum,” which, he says, is Egyptian for wax. Representations of the embalming process have been found on tombs and sarcophagi, in which the men engaged in it are seen wearing masks with eagles' beaks, probably iron masks, thereby denoting of what a poisonous and dangerous nature this absolutely incorruptible embalmment must have been. The Pyramids are perhaps the most imposing funeral monuments ever raised to the memory of mortals, and even the famous Mausoleum of Artemisia can have had no more massive or eternal an aspect.