“Ye who amid this feverish world would wearA body free of pains, of cares the mind,Fly the rank city; shun the turbid air;Breathe not the Chaos of eternal smoke,And volatile corruption from the dead,The dying, sickening, and the living worldExhaled, to sully Heaven’s transparent domeWith dim mortality.”
“Ye who amid this feverish world would wearA body free of pains, of cares the mind,Fly the rank city; shun the turbid air;Breathe not the Chaos of eternal smoke,And volatile corruption from the dead,The dying, sickening, and the living worldExhaled, to sully Heaven’s transparent domeWith dim mortality.”
“Ye who amid this feverish world would wearA body free of pains, of cares the mind,Fly the rank city; shun the turbid air;Breathe not the Chaos of eternal smoke,And volatile corruption from the dead,The dying, sickening, and the living worldExhaled, to sully Heaven’s transparent domeWith dim mortality.”
“Ye who amid this feverish world would wear
A body free of pains, of cares the mind,
Fly the rank city; shun the turbid air;
Breathe not the Chaos of eternal smoke,
And volatile corruption from the dead,
The dying, sickening, and the living world
Exhaled, to sully Heaven’s transparent dome
With dim mortality.”
That interment, or enclosing the dead in a grave, is a most ancient custom, there cannot be a doubt. Amongst the ancient Jews to have no burial was reckoned among the greatest of calamities. The exposure in any manner of their dead (even criminals) was looked upon as a pollution of their land. The Egyptians and Asiatics practised interment from the beginning of time. Subsequently, it became the custom toburnthe bodies of the dead. By Homer’s description of the funeral of Patroclus, it would appear that the Greeks used burning as early as the Trojan war. They also had recourse to interment, as is seen by their historians, who give an account of the manner in which the body was placed in the grave: Plutarch tells us that they were laid with their faces towards the east or towards the west; and Cicero informs us that, in early times, as those of Cecrops, interment was altogether made use of by the Greeks,—but we have ample testimony in history that it always took placewithouttheir cities, particularly amongst the Jews and Greeks, from whom the Romans derived the practice. We have several passages in the New Testament, showing that the Jews buried their deadwithouttheir city. Thus, the sepulchre in which Joseph of Arimathea laid our Saviour’s body was in the same place where he was crucified (John xix. 41), which was near the city (John xix. 20). And we are taught in St. Matthew (xxviii. 52–53), that, at our Lord’s passion, the graves were opened, and many bodies of the saints which slept, arose and came out of the graves after his resurrection, andwent into the Holy City, and appeared unto many.
Servius, in giving an account of the unhappy death of his colleague Marcellus, which happened in Greece, says that he could not by any means obtain leave of the Athenians toallow him a burying-placewithinthe city. The Romans observed the same custom from the first building of their city; it afterwards became a law, as settled by the Decemviri, “Neither burn nor bury within the city.” They generally buried near the highways, in fields appropriated for the purpose. Their reason seems to have been founded on sacred as well as civil considerations: among the former, that passengers might see the graves, and be reminded of their own mortality—hence, as Varro tells us, the inscription on the monuments, ‘Sta viator!’—among the latter, “that the air might not be corrupted by the stench of putrifying bodies.” It is related of Propertius, that he was very earnest in desiring that he might not be buried after the ordinary custom, near aroad, for fear it should disturb his shade. There were, however, exceptions amongst the Romans to the prohibition of intramural burials, as in the case of the Vestal Virgins, who, Servius informs us, were allowed by law a burying-place within the city. The same privilege or honour was permitted to some extraordinary persons, as to Valerius Publicola and to Fabricius, to continue to their heirs; yet none of their families were afterwards interred there, but the body being carried thither, some one placed a burning torch under it, and then immediately took it away, as an attestation of the deceased’s privilege, and his receding from the honour. The body was then removed for burial to another place without the city.
The ancient Persians never buried in cities or towns. Their kings were interred on a high hill on the east of Persepolis: generally throughout Persia and the Levant, there were no burying-places except those without the city.
The cemeteries of the Turks were always without the towns, that the air might not be corrupted by the vapours arising from the graves: they, in like manner as the Romans, also bury by the sides of highways, that travellers may be reminded to pray to God for the deceased. The Chinese adopt a similar kind of sepulture. Eusebius informs us thatwhen the Christians, by favour of Constantine, built churches in the cities, they had their burial-places allotted them outside the cities and towns.
According to Gregory of Tours, it was not until the latter part of the sixth century, aboutA.D.590, that funeral places and cemeteries within the towns were consecrated.
Intramural burials and churchyards, it would seem, originated in the idea that persons passing the graves of their relatives or friends on their way to worship, might be reminded to offer up prayers for them; and the profit might also be another motive. The gross and horrible indignities now so frequently offered to the dead in consequence of over-crowding, to the great scandal of our national religion and character as a Christian people, could never have been contemplated; on the contrary, it was intended to offer a sacred asylum for the mortal remains of those whose memories were dear to us.
It was a maxim, not only with the Jews, but with all nations of the world, that holy places are polluted by the presence of dead carcases or of dead men’s bones. Hence we find that when Josiah desired to profane the altars dedicated to idols, he burned dead men’s bones upon them, which he took out of the sepulchres that were on the mount (2 Kings xxiii. 16). And when God threatened by Ezekiel to punish Israel, he told them that their altars should be desolate: “and I will lay the dead carcases of the children of Israel before their idols, and I will scatter your bones round about your altars.” (Ezekiel vi. 5.) As the Jews by the divine law had ablutions, washings, and purifications for defilements by the dead, which is called Βαπτισμὸs ἀπὸ νεκρῶν (Ecclesiasticus xxxiv. 25),—a washing from the pollution contracted by the touch of a dead body,—so the Gentiles also from them had the rite of purification for defilements contracted from the dead; for theFlamensorFunera Mater, when dismissing the people after a funeral, sprinkled them with water to purge them of the pollution received by the sight of the interment; and on their entering into a temple, they werefirst sprinkled with holy water, the ωυραντιεια, so often mentioned by heathen writers, lest they should appear polluted before the gods.
Hosperian informs us that the ancients greatly opposed the innovation of burying in towns and churches, and on that account the councils of their bishops made several canons and decrees against intramural and church burials.
Whether the ancients burned or interred their dead, they never made choice of the place of divine worship, either to bury the body or deposit its ashes. For centuries after Christianity was established, they never presumed to make God’s temple the carnicle of the dead: on the contrary, when the ancient mode of burial without the city began to be neglected, burials in churches were opposed by authority. A law in the Theodosian Code has these words: “Let no one imagine that the churches of the Apostles and Martyrs were designed for burial-places for the dead.” The Emperor Charles the Great has this injunction, “Let no one bury any dead in the church.” Subsequently, Louis the Pious most strenuously opposed burying within the churches, requiring “that the constitutions, used and settled by the ancient Fathers, should be observed in the burial of the dead.”
So tenacious were the ancients of anything like desecration of their churches, that we are told by Baronius that one Borachas being persecuted by the Gentiles at Gaza, and having been left for dead, the Christians took him up and carried him into the church; the Gentiles and some of the authorities, on making inquiry for him, complained that the Christians had broken the liberty of their city, and had trespassed against their laws: for that they had brought a dead body into the city, which ought in no wise to be done; they supposing that Borachas was dead.
The being buried in or near a church, we are told, originated with the first Christian emperor, Constantine, who, although he did not desire to be buried within the church (a thing in his day unheard-of), was resolved that his remains should be deposited as near as possible to it, andthey were accordingly inhumed in the porch of the great church at Constantinople. Subsequently, the practice increased, and persons of quality claimed a similar privilege; their inferiors again, although they claimed not the right of being buried within the porches, deemed it an honour to be buried as near thereto as possible; hence, another reason assigned for large courts and yards about churches.
“The melancholy ghosts of dead renownWith penitential aspect, as they pass’d,All point at earth and smile at human pride.”
“The melancholy ghosts of dead renownWith penitential aspect, as they pass’d,All point at earth and smile at human pride.”
“The melancholy ghosts of dead renownWith penitential aspect, as they pass’d,All point at earth and smile at human pride.”
“The melancholy ghosts of dead renown
With penitential aspect, as they pass’d,
All point at earth and smile at human pride.”
Some time after, Pope Gregory the Great brought into the churches, and set up in the most solemn manner, relics enshrined in cases of gold, which were sometimes placed upon, or over, but generally under the altar. This made persons flock towards them, and bury their dead there, in the hope that both might receive benefit from such veneration. Thus, that which was originally considered a profanation, ultimately, through the corruption of subsequent ages, became not only a means of satisfying ambitious pride, but also apparently of conferring the blessings of eternal happiness.
The custom of interring persons of rank in churches was first introduced into this country by Cuthbert, the tenth Archbishop of Canterbury, who in the yearA.D.798 procured the privilege from the Pope to have churchyards for interment: with reference to burying in churches, the custom did not arise earlier than the year 1076. In the reign of William the Conqueror, the council held at Winchester, under Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, by the ninth canon, opposed burial in churches; it soon after, however, became a custom, and vaults were built under the altars.
“It is horrid,” said the Austrian emperor, “that a place of worship—a temple of the Supreme Being—should be converted into a pest-house for living creatures.”
A person who upon his death-bed makes it a condition in his will that he should be buried in a church or chapel,acts like a madman; he ought to set his fellow-creatures a good example, and not do all in his power to destroy their health by exposing them to the effluvia arising from a corpse in a state of putrefaction.
The following extract is from a sermon preached in 1552 by Bishop Latimer, which proves that even at that comparatively early period, when the population of London could scarcely have been one-fifth of what it is now, the nuisance of intramural interments was found to be dangerous to health. “The citizens of Naim,” observed the bishop, “hadd their buryinge-place withoute the citie, which no doubt is a laudable thinge; and I doe marvel that London, being soe great a citie, hath not a burial-place without; for no doubt it is an unwholesome thinge to bury within the citie, especiallie at such a time when there be great sicknesses and manie die together. I think, verilie, that many a man taketh his death in St. Paul’s churchyard, and this I speak of experience, for I myself, when I have been there some mornings to heare the sermons, have felt such an ill-savoured and unwholesome savour, that I was the worse for it a great while after; and I think no lesse but it is the occasion of great sicknesse and disease.”
Well would it have been for the inhabitants of this vast metropolis had Sir Christopher Wren’s plan been carried out at the rebuilding of the city, after the fire of 1666. All churchyards were to have been removed without the town.
In the year 1786, the legislature of Germany passed a law, which was punctually observed in the empire over which Joseph the Second ruled, and which we would do well to imitate, instead of using the under-part of our chapels as store and pest-houses. This law prohibited the burying of dead bodies in any chapel or church whatever; neither rank nor affluence can obtain permission to evade it, as in the enforcement of it no respect is paid to persons.
Of the injurious and fatal effects of exhalations from overcharging burial-places, we have a striking illustration, thatscarcely admits of a doubt[7]—at least, as far as predisposition goes. In an old work, entitled ‘Dr. Dover’s Ancient Physician’s Legacy,’ we have the following; Dover, it must be understood, was an extraordinary character, uniting in his own person the profession of physic and buccaneering. He says:—“When I took by storm the two cities of Guyaquil, under the line, in the South Seas, it happened that, not long before, the plague had raged amongst them. For our better security and the keeping of our people together, we lay in the churches, and likewise brought thither the plunder of the cities. We were very much annoyed by the smell of the dead bodies. These could hardly be said to be buried; for the Spaniards abroad use no coffins, but throw several dead bodies, one upon another, with only a draw-board over them; so that it was no wonder we caught the infection. In a few days after we went on board, one of the surgeons came to acquaint me that several of my men were taken after a violent manner, with that languor of spirits that they were not able to move; in less than forty-eight hours, we had in our ships one hundred and eighty men in this miserable condition.”
Dr. Adam Clarke, in his ‘Commentary on St. Luke,’ advises that “No burying-places should be tolerated withinCITIESorTOWNS, much less in or aboutCHURCHESandCHAPELS. This custom is excessively injurious to the inhabitants, and especially to those who frequent public worship in suchCHAPELSandCHURCHES. God, decency, and health forbid this shocking abomination. * * * From long observation I can attest thatCHURCHESandCHAPELSsituated in graveyards, and those especially within whose walls the dead are interred, are perfectly unwholesome; and many, by attending such places, are shortening their passage to the house appointed for the living. What increases the iniquityof this abominable and deadly work is, that the burying-grounds attached to manyCHURCHESandCHAPELSare made a source ofPRIVATE GAIN. The whole of this preposterous conduct is as indecorous and unhealthy as it is profane. Every man should know that the gas which is disengaged from putrid flesh, and particularly from a human body, is not only unfriendly to, but destructive of, animal life. Superstition first introduced a practice which self-interest and covetousness continue to maintain.”
The Rev. Dr. Render, in his ‘Tour through Germany’ published in London, in the year 1801, mentions the following case:—“In the month of July, 17—, a very corpulent lady died at——. Before her death, she begged, as a particular favour, to be buried in the parochial church: she died on the Wednesday, and on the following Saturday was buried according to her desire. The day following, the clergyman preached her funeral sermon: the weather was uncommonly hot; and it ought to be observed that, for several months preceding her death, a great drought had prevailed; not a drop of rain had fallen, consequently it was an uncommonly sultry season. The succeeding Sunday, the Protestant clergyman had a very full congregation, upwards of 900 persons attending, that being the day for administering the Holy Sacrament. The weather still continuing very hot, many were obliged during the service to walk out for a time, to avoid fainting; whilst some actually fainted away. It is the custom, in Germany, that when people wish to receive the sacrament, they neither eat nor drink that day, until the ceremony is entirely over. The sermon occupied about one hour and a quarter; after which the bread was consecrated, and, according to custom, remained uncovered during the ceremony.
“There were about one hundred and eighty communicants. A quarter of an hour after the ceremony, before they had quitted the church, more than sixty of them were taken ill; several died in the most severe agonies; others, of a more vigorous constitution, survived by the help of medicalassistance; a most violent consternation prevailed throughout the whole congregation and town. It was concluded that the wine had been poisoned, and so it was generally believed; the sacristan, and several others belonging to the vestry, were immediately arrested, and cast into prison. The clergyman, on the succeeding Sunday, preached very excitingly, and pointed out to his congregation several others concerned in the plot. This enthusiastic sermon was printed. The persons accused underwent very great hardships; during the space of a week they were confined in a dungeon, and some of them were put to the torture; but they persisted in asserting their innocence. On the Sunday following, the magistrate ordered that a chalice of wine, uncovered, should be placed for the space of an hour upon the altar, which time had scarcely elapsed when they beheld the wine filled with myriads of insects; and by tracing them to their source it was at length perceived, by the rays of the sun, that they issued from the grave of the lady who had been buried the preceding fortnight. The people not belonging to the vestry were dismissed, and four men employed to open the grave and the coffin; in doing which two of them dropped down, and expired upon the spot; and the other two were only saved by the utmost exertion of medical talent. It is beyond the power of words to describe the horrid sight of the corpse when the coffin was opened. The whole was a mass of entire putrefaction; and it was now clearly demonstrated that the numerous insects, both large and small, together with the effluvia which had issued from the body, had caused the pestilential infection, which was a week before attributed to poison. On this discovery, those who had been accused of poisoning the wine, &c., were liberated, and atonement made by the clergyman and magistrate for their unfounded charge.”
It was said by St. Cyril, when offering an excuse for the mode of burial of the Gentiles, “that their temples were only beautiful monuments of dead men.” How differently would he have expressed himself with regard to our Christianmetropolitan churches or temples of this, the nineteenth century, which are loathsome receptacles of corruption!
But a few years ago, in the autumn of 1843, the poisonous effects of disturbing a graveyard were but too fatally evident. The church and churchyard of Minchinhampton are very old,—the latter having served for a burying-ground for the previous five hundred years; it was consequently densely crowded with dead bodies. In rebuilding the church, it became necessary, or was thought expedient, to lower the surface of the graveyard to within a foot or two of the remains of those buried. Many bodies were disturbed during this process, and re-interred. The earth so removed of a dark colour—saturated, in fact, with the product of human putrefaction—was, in a fatal hour, devoted to the purposes of agriculture! About one thousand cart-loads were thus employed—some on a new piece of burial-ground, to make the grass grow quickly, some as manure on the neighbouring fields, some in the rector’s garden! and some in that of the patron. The seeds of disease were thus widely sown, and the result was such as any person of common sense might have expected. The diffusion of a morbid poison which soon followed, was evinced by an outbreak of fever in this previously healthy locality. The family of the rector, and the inhabitants of the streets adjoining the churchyard, were the first attacked, and were also the greatest sufferers. The rector lost his wife, his daughter, and his gardener. The patron’s gardener, who had been employed in the unseemly act of dressing flower-beds with human manure, also died. In short, wherever the earth had been taken, disease followed. The children who attended the school took fever as they passed the upturned surface of the graveyard, went home, and died; but they did not communicate the disease to those who came near them, nor did it occur in any person who had not been exposed to the cause of its development. Seventeen deaths occurred, and upwards of two hundred children were attacked with measles, scarlet fever, and peculiar eruptions.
Should not the fearful consequences of such unhallowed proceedings be viewed as the retributive hand of Heaven, overtaking those concerned in the desecration of the dead? The appropriation of the soil, which should have been held as sacred;—of human remains, for the purposes of agriculture—the cultivation of vegetables and flowers! and by one, too, holding the sacred office of a pastor.O tempora! O mores!
Considering the immense importance of the subject, in a moral as well as in a physical point of view, it is lamentable in the extreme and truly disgraceful to a nation boasting of its character, general superiority, and wealth, that a practice (intramural burial) should obtain, in behalf of which no one single argument can be adduced, but against which, religion, history, common sense, and daily experience may be arrayed.
On reviewing the foregoing observations, and on seriously contemplating the condition of the ill-ventilated rooms and workshops, the damp, dark, and insalubrious cellars,—little better than dungeons,—the dreary, close, stifling courts, and narrow dark alleys of this vast metropolis, into which the light of heaven rarely penetrates;—we say, while contemplating these abodes of our lower classes, (which would be injurious even to swine,) the culpable apathy, prejudice, and bad arrangements of those whose duty it is to remedy such crying evils, cannot but be obvious. In conclusion, we would therefore earnestly recommend to all such delinquents for their guidance, and to all those enlisted in the cause of sanitary reform, the salutary directions as to washing, cleansing, purification, &c., conveyed in the Mosaic Ordinances, especially in the following passages, as showing with what minuteness all matters appertaining to health, to the very freeing of houses from damp, were directed; that we, the enlightened and refined of the nineteenth century, may profit thereby.
“34 When ye be come into the land of Canaan, which Igive to you for a possession, and I put the plague of leprosy[8]in a house of the land of your possession;
35 And he that owneth the house shall come and tell the priest, saying, It seemeth to methere isas it were a plague in the house:
36 Then the priest shall command that they empty the house, before the priest gointo itto see the plague, that all thatisin the house be not made unclean; and afterwards the priest shall go in to see the house:
37 And he shall look on the plague, and, behold,IFthe plaguebein the walls of the house with hollow strakes, greenish or reddish, which in sightarelower than the wall;
38 Then the priest shall go out of the house to the door of the house, and shut up the house seven days:
39 And the priest shall come again the seventh day, andshall look: and, behold,ifthe plague be spread in the walls of the house;
40 Then the priest shall command that they take away the stones in which the plagueis, and they shall cast them into an unclean place without the city:
41 And he shall cause the house to be scraped within round about, and they shall pour out the dust that they scrape off without the city into an unclean place:
42 And they shall take other stones, and putthemin the place of those stones; and he shall take other mortar, and shall plaister the house.
43 And if the plague come again, and break out in the house, after that he hath taken away the stones, and after he hath scraped the house, and after it is plaistered;
44 Then the priest shall come and look, and, behold,ifthe plague be spread in the house, itisa fretting leprosy in the house: itISunclean.
45 And he shall break down the house, the stones of it, and the timber thereof, and all the mortar of the house; and he shall carrythemforth out of the city into an unclean place.”
Leviticus, chap. xiv.