CREMATION NOT CHRISTIAN BURIAL.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XII, Issue 12, 11 July 1884, Page 31

CREMATION NOT CHRISTIAN BURIAL.

(From the London Month.") It ia important that the Church's supreme authority over the matter of disposal of the Christian dead should be recognised, as well as her power of adaptation to the necessities, though not to the vagaries of modern civilization. If the burial of the bodies of her children in the earth were accompanied by some serious mischief or danger, she could at any moment authorize their committal to the flames. But no such need can be asserted at present. ~ The movement in favor of cremation has its origin, not in any difficulty in finding a place where the dead may be conveniently and safely laid, but in a Pagan renaissance. Even though many of the advocates of cremation are, at least nominally, Christians, yet none the less is the movement a heathen one. A few eccentric enthusiasts may be found to advocate almost any novelty, especially one which has certain plausible arguments in its favor. But the strength of the movement is to be found iv the desire to throw over all that is distinctively Christain. Many among our literary men are open advocates of Greek and Roman as distinguished from Christian civilization, and such men are instinctively cremationists. On the Continent the anti-Catholic and antiChristian nature of cremation is far more clearly marked than in England, just as Free Masonry comes out far more into relief when it is in the midst of Catholicity, and implies a hostility to all religion which it does not profess ia Protestant England. Thecrema tionists are but repeating the policy of the persecutors of the early Christians. They burned the bodies of their victims in order to demonstrate thereby the impossibility of the resurrection. When they scattered to the winds the calciued ashes, they cried in mockery : " Now let us see if they will rise again." All who favor cremation are playing into the hands of modern heathenism. The well-instructed Catholic may know that the scattered ashes can re-assume their former shape just as easily as if the body were laid in the ground. But the ignorant and ill-educated are led mainly by imagination and by sense. By the side of the crematorium and in sight of the little urn containing the ashes of the dead, they would find it far more difficult to realize the future resurrection than if they stood by the open grave or walked among the quiet mounds in the Christian cemetery. It may be an utterly absurd and ad captandum, argument to point to the handful of calcined dust and to appeal to it as an argument against the identity of the bodies after the resurrection, but it is one which would catch the vulgar mind and furnish an excuse for unbelief to those who are, for whatever reason, tempted to lose their faith . Our readers will already have gathered the conclusions to which oar line of argument, has led us. Cremation is, under present eoclesiastical legislation, a practical rejection of Christian burial ; it is not in itself unlawful of its own nature, but it is rendered unlawful by the obligation of Christian burial which lies upon the faithful. If the case should present itself of a' Catholic leaving directions in his will that his body should be burned, without there being any urgent necessity for this mode of disposing of his body, such a man could hardly be absolved by a priest without reference to the Bishop, who would be the judge whether cremation was so distinctly excluded by the ritual of the Church as to involve a mortal sin, and whether the circumstances justified in this particular case a departure from the usual ceremonial of the Church. At the same time it is quite possible, though scarcely probable, that the time will come when the Ctiurch. exercising hsr supreme right, will authorize cremation to prevent greater evils. .