THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 1903. WAYS THAT REQUIRE MENDING.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXI, Issue 4, 22 January 1903, Page 16

THURSDAY, JANUARY 22, 1903. WAYS THAT REQUIRE MENDING.

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«. HE report of the Reform of Funerals Association, which was presented at the annual meeting held the other day in London, brings home to us the fact that though the special evils which the Association set itself to combat are dead > or dyirg, new and piettier, and, therefore, more troublesome abuses are taking their places. It was, we think, a Texan town that witnessed, once on a time, the strange spectacle of a clown, in paint-patches and baggy pantaloons, weeping honest tears at the funeral of an eccentric benefactor. The idea was incongruous to a degree ; but there was, we ween, far less of essential folly in the spectacle than there is in many of the~strange absurdities that custom now sanctions in the house of mourning and by the graveside of the dead. The most reprehensible of these are meant not so much to honor or benefit the dead as to inflate the vanity of the relatives whom they leave behind. The old custom of feasting and gormandising over the bodies of the dead has lived lon^ and is dying hard. The Jews of old borrowed it from their pagan Greek neighbors, and their funeral feasts became so burdensome that they frequently reduced the luckless heirs to a state of beggary. Zangwill's curiously interesting wurks show that the funeral feast still survives among the descendants of the Chosen People, whose homes are in the Ghettos or Jewish quarters ot. London, Rome, and other European cities. The old-time Irish ' wake ' was the survival of a similar evil custom. And baked meats are to this hour associated, in the minds of a large class of English poor, with what is termed ' slau-nD funeral.

There is neither common sense nor Christian feeling in these exhibitions of foolish pride that glories in a few hours' vulgar and wasteful, if well-meant, displays of seeming wealth. There is as little of either in the present cumbersome displays of flowers at funerals, against which the Association beforenamed is inaugurating an active crusade. Thia custom is condemned by positive ecclesiastical enactments in Australia and the United States. It is strongly • discouraged in the decrees of the first Provincial Synod of Wellington, and it is opposed to Catholic feeling. The custom was originally pagan. The ancient Greeks bedecked their dead with flowers. But in the early days of the catacombs, and in every time and place in which the spirit of the Catholic liturgy has been carried out, neither wreaths nor flowers ever surrounded the bodies of the dead. Flowers have been aptly styled ' nature's smiles.' They are the emblems of sweetness and brightness and joy. They deck the brow of the newlywedded bride. They appear at every festival, and — as we said some time ago in a brief note upon this subject — they are as out of tune with a place of weeping as a step-dance, or aa the paint and patches and baggy habiliments of the clown at the Texan funeral. 'The dominant note of the Christian death,' says Canon Moser some years ago, ' is fear

and supplication, an acknowledgment of the awful rigors of God's inscrutable Justice, tempered with confidence in the merits of His dolo-ous passion. So long as the Church is not certain that her children have arrived in Heaven's gate, she has not the heart to rejoice. And therefore it is that flowers — nature's symbols of joy — at modern interments are in flagrant contradiction with the spirit of the liturgy.' * The custom of decking the death-chamber and the grave with flowers seems to have received considerable impetus in England after the Reformation — perhaps as a substitute for the solemnities of the old Catholic liturgy which were docked by Act of Parliament. Sir ThoMAS Overbury tells, for instance, of the ' faire and happy milkmaid ' that ' all her care is that she may die in the spring-time, to have sto eof flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet.' Shakespeare mates the Qaeen in • Hamlet ' scatter flowers over the grave of Ophelia, and Arviragus and Belarius strew with pale primrose and azure hare-bell and leaf of eglantine the tomb of the hapless Imogen. Herrick and others tuned their lyres and canonised the custom in more or less successful verse. But it required a stronger tonic than Herrick's ' Dirge of Jephtha ' or the sp'ay-foot lines of the lesser rhyrcsters to keep the custom alive ; and when Washington Irving wrote his ' Sketch-book ' — which appeared in 1820 — he said that the custom was ' only to be met with in the most distant and retired parts of the kingdom [England], where fashion and innovation have not been able to throng in and trample out all the curious and interesting traces of the olden time.' • But fashions in funerals come and go, die and get disentombed, like fashions in skirts and head -gear. And it was, in a way, appropriate that the unchristian usage of strewing roses and daffodils and such-like blooms over the disintegrating dead should find favor once more in an age that has retrograded to almost indiscriminate divorce and to godless education and to other ideals of pagan Greece and Rome. The revival sneaked in apologetically at first into what are called the ' upper circles,' that seb the fashion in grave-trappings as well as in bonnets and toques. Then it came along with a rush, and spread over the Fnglishspeaking world, till masses of more or less tangled blossom came to be deemed almost as indispensable a requisite for a ' respectable funeral ' as the corpse itself. The fashion has led, in many instances, to sinful extravagance. The dead know it not, nor profit gain It only serves to prove the living vain. Tidy fortunes have sometimes been expended on funeral wreaths. As much as £500 to £100G is quite commonly expended in providing a peiishable display of blossom for the funeral of a notable person in England and the United States. When Mr August in Daly, the Anglo-American playwright, had ' passed in bis checks ' and was about to be placed beneath the surface of mother earth, the oppressively odorous funeral wreaths piled in a colored cairn about his coffin represented an outlay of £2,500 — one of them, sent by Mrs George Gould, cost £400. The wreaths that smothered the coffin of the late Lord Leighton cost over £5000. At the funeral of President Carxot a sum of over £6000 was spent on flowers. 'J his amount has been exceeded at the interment of several American millionaires, and it is said that £10,000 would not have purchased the ' floral tributes ' that figured at the obsequies of the Duke of Clarence. Without counting the cost of flowers, the expenses of the funeral of the late Queen Victoria were set down at £35,5u0, that of the Emperor William of Germany £25,000, tthile it cost over £40,000 to consign Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia to the resting-place where he is to await the last sound of the Archangel's trumpet. It takes a good deal of minted coin to get deceased royalty out of sight. But perhaps the costliest contract of this kind that was ever uudurtuken was the interment of Alexander the Great. Some £. 00,000 was spent before the hardhitting conqueror was safely ' planted ' in mother earth. * The body,' says a wiiter, ' was placed in a coffin of gold, filled with costly aromatics, and a diadem was placed on the head. The funeral car was embellished with ornaments of pure gold, and its weight was so great that it took 84 mules more than a year to convey it from Babylon to Syria.'

The faßhion of * floral tributes * has taken a strong hold upon Australia and New Zealand, and during the past quarter century or thereabouts custom has . . . brazed it no That it be proof and bulwark against sense. A reform is needed, and there are indications that it is coming, even though its feet be leaden and its pace be slow. The Sydney Synod of 1895 strongly urged the discontinuance of the habit. Some four years ago the aged and venerable Bishop Murray, of Maitland, said in the course of a sermon on the subject : ' When I die there will be no flowers strewn about me ; but I hope there will be plenty of rosaries for me, plenty of prayers and Masses and Holy Communions.' Ths venerable prelate was, we believe, the first in Australasia to inaugurate a systematic crusade against this revival of a pagan custom. This was in 1898. "The fashion of flowers at funerals,' said he, ♦is a worldly pomp which is growing into a very great abuse, and on and after the first day of January next no flowers will be 'permitted to enter the church with a coffin, and no priest will assist at funerals where this unbecoming custom of flowers is adopted. The clergy, of course, cannot interfere with people in their own homes. They have, however, authority over the church and over the consecrated ground of God'sacre, and are determined that no flowers shall be permitted to enter either of these places in connection with funerals after the first day of the new year [1900].' Sometimes — but all too rarely — we read at the close of funeral announcements the brief and sensible notice : « Flowers respectfully declined.' We wish that every Catholic funeral in the Colony were conducted on similar lines, so far as this abuse of flowers is concerned.