Year: 1874

One of the idiosynerasies of our
common nature is that we seem to
have more consideration for man after
he is dead than while he is alive. Very
often We neglect and disparage him in
the flesh, and esteem and eulogize him
10 the grave. Examination has more
power than great deeds to make heroes,
for the shadow of the tomb is glamour
to the living. Perfect appreciation be-
longs to obituaries. The earliest mur-
mur of fame is frequently the echo Of
the first earth thrown on the cofin-lid.


This disposition to delay honor and
withhold affection for the advent of the
undertaken, this propensity to retain
chaplets for the sake of employing them
as immortelles, is witnessed in mortuary
celebration. We must compound with
our conscience for our disregard of the
living by our attention to the dead. By
some irrational casuistry we must con-
clude that we make amends to kind
hearts we have rejected by piling marble
mockeries above their silent pulses On
ly by such assumption can we explain
the solicitude and veneration that have
been shown in all countries and in all
ages for the lifeless body. Race, cline,
or creed has made little difference in
what might be called the universal cor.
poreal superstition. However hostile,
unjust, or cruel human nature may be
to one of its co.heirs, its tendency is to
the benignant, even to the sentimental,
when good offices have been made super
huous by funeral. Respect may be
slender or null for the breathing, think
ing, sensitive, sympathetic form, but a
certain sacredness attaches thereto the
moment it becomes clay. The divine
spark, the godlike element, as it is styled,
appears to count for nothing, save by its
absence.


Pagans and Christians, SociniaDs and
Scripturalists, agree in this post mortem
veneration. No people have as yet been
discovered, whatever their wildness or
antiquity who have not had sepulchral
rites, and associated them with a certain
degree of solemnity. Indeed, sepulture
may be regarded as the marks of the
human species. Where that is omitted
the trace of humanity is lost, since no
order OF the lower animals evinces care
for the dead. The annals of the race
are revealed by the vestiges of tombs
which antedate by ages the historic pc
riod, and which still puzzle the most
learned of arch@ologists. We are con-
nected with the past, the dimmest and
remotest, by an endless line of graves,
and all we know of countless nations is
that they died and were buried. This
revolving ball, with its hundreds of mil.
lions of inhabitants, is but vast grave
yard. The living bear but an infinitesi.





NAL proportion to the dead, whose re-
mains are incorporated with every foot
of soil we call our own. We are as
handful of men standing between the bill
lions gone and the billions yet to come,
ON one hand the inheritors of Time,
on the other the heirs of Eternity.


Interments, reasoning by induction,
have almost always been associated with
some form of religion, and their rites
have often been preserved when the faith
which inspired them has been forgotten.
Not few of the funeral ceremonies of
the present day are anachronistic, be-
cause they have been borrowed without
understanding from different past, and
are meaningless because the link is bro.
ken that bound them in significance
Harper's Magazine