A BISHOP ON CREMATION

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXI, 24 June 1937, Page 8

A BISHOP ON CREMATION

LIFELONG ADVOCATE ‘‘Like so many others of my generation I have been a litelong advocate of cremation,” said Dr. Deane, Bishop of Aberdeen, in laying the dedication stone at Kaimhill, Aberdeen, of a crematorium. ”1 am glad to know that I share my opinion with the greatest divines and leaders of religious thought in the Anglican communion throughout the world to-day,” he added. “There is no principle in the Christian religion on which could be based any condemnation of the practice of cremation. It is abundantly clear that only a blind, childish, and ignorant superstition could condemn the practice of cremation as contrary to the Christian faith, while in our modern world, with its vast populations crowded in great cities, the practice is obviously right and reasonable and good. It is only a grotesque and archaic superstition whicii could hold that constituent particles of the body buried in the ground will be reassembled and reformed by a miracle for which no reason or purpose could ever be adduced. No one would have been more surprised than St. Paul to find that lbs teaching had been distorted so. Our belies are but a suit of clothing, a drab and homespun suit of clothing for our souls, often too threadbare to be endured. Whatever the spiritual body may be, it must surely belong t 0 a different order and exist upon another plane in a different dimension than the dimension of time and space in which our earthly bodies are cabined, cribbpd and confined.”