“Yes,” remarked the surgeon; “nothing but the lapse of a people into cannibalism can obliterate that sentiment. When the Egyptian embalmers were ready for their work, a certain person came forward and made the necessary incisions for taking out the entrails. He immediately fled away, pursued by volleys of stones and curses from all the others. Hence also the dissections of the dead by medical students are conducted with the utmost secrecy and caution.”
“Schiller,” said I, “makes one of his heroes remark that the first time he plunged his sword into a living man, he felt a shudder creep over him as if he had desecrated the temple of God.”
“Besides the feeling of reverence,” continued the clergyman, “we have the awe which death naturally inspires, the melancholy excited by the vain and transitory nature of earthly things; and lastly, a tender and curious interest for the brother-soul which has tasted the sweetness of life and the bitterness of death, and passed onward to those hidden but grander experiences which await us all.”
“Those shocking Egyptian mummies,” said one of the officers, “are so disgusting that a strange horror is mingled with the gentler emotions you describe.”
“I experienced that feeling,” said another, “on reading an account of the exhumation of the remains, or rather the opening of the coffin, of King Charles I., two hundred years after he had been beheaded. It was increased, doubtless, by the idea of the separated head and body, and the strange and lifelike stare of the king’s eyes, which collapsed like soap-bubbles when they were exposed to the air.”
“There was something of the picturesque in that finding of a dead body by some little children who were playing in a grotto in France. It was seated on a stone bench and perfectly petrified, retaining, however, a sweet and placid expression of countenance. The man was an old hermit, who frequently retired into the deepest chamber of the grotto for religious contemplation.”
“Imagine yourself,” said I, “in the silence and shadows of Westminster Abbey, peering through some crevice in an old vault and getting a sight of the shrunken dust of Shakespeare.”
“Passing from imagination to fact,” said solemnly the old surgeon, “I have seen the body of a man lying upon the ground where it had lain undisturbed for eighteen hundred years.”
“Eighteen hundred years!” exclaimed several voices at once.
“Yes, eighteen hundred years; and I was the first person who set eyes upon him from the day of his death until I got into the cavern where he perished.”