go on as we have begun. Whether you and I find ourselves King’s ministers in a few weeks, with priests and bishops under our feet, and our religion saved; or whether we have the other fate before us—” He laughed as he remarked on the customary reluctance to designate that other fate, and said outright—“whether we are dragged to prison, and to the bar, to hear insults which sorely try the natural man, and to the scaffold to be cut to pieces by malice in cold blood, and denied Christian burial,—whichever of these is before us, we have the same thing to do now,—to devote ourselves to our own Protestant King, and the cause for which we invited and proclaimed him.”
BURIAL.
“What must we do with the corpse?” is a question that has forced itself on the attention of men since the beginning of the world. There seems to be a natural sentiment of respect in human kind everywhere for the remains of the dead. Death, too, is so inevitable, and happens so often in every numerous community, that some regularly understood system must be adopted for the proper removal and deposition of the “empty tenement,” out of regard to public health and morals, as well as religion. Any neglect or disrespect in this matter has been always visited with reprobation. For the credit of humanity, it must be said that affectionate regard for relatives and friends has not always ceased with their death, even in rude times; and although the performance of good offices towards the remains of fellow-creatures is not seldom marked by ostentatious display, let us hope that these demonstrations are excrescences that have grown out of a real feeling in human beings to pay the last attentions to the dead with decency and respect. According to M. Du Chaillu a sense of the presence of a friend seems to the untutored African mind to linger, at least for a time, round his grave. But people have not always arrived at precisely the same conclusions as to the way of best showing their regard for “friends departed;” and they have sometimes hit upon what we in this country would consider—most properly, of course—a very odd fashion.
Perhaps no two men ever yet agreed as to the proper plan for doing things right; and so people have had their own conscientious opinions regarding “the right thing to do” with “the corpse.” According to Sir Charles Lyell holes and caves were the receptacles of human remains in very ancient times indeed. A natural cavity in the ground was probably the first kind of tomb; and whether from superstitious fear of separation, or from the want of proper tools for digging easily, many bodies seem to have been deposited together in such places. Similarly Abraham purchased a cave as a sepulchre, adopting a custom originally established by chance or necessity. The Jewish tomb, hewn out of a rock, was probably a refined descendant of the old cave. In such places the bodies were merely hidden “out of sight,” not buried, strictly speaking. When the simple cave was used the funeral ceremonies appear to have been of the simplest possible kind. It was when men became settled in civilised communities, as in Egypt, and their affectionate sensibilities were strengthened by the pleasure of social life, that a more elaborate and costly system of interment became established. Domestic affection seems to have suggested the effort to retain the remains of the dead as long as possible, and led to the art of embalming. In Egypt, then, when a death occurred in a family, “the right thing to do” was to send for the doctor. The medical gentlemen of the day had not only the privilege of doseing and scarifying people when alive; but even when dead “vile bodies” had another ordeal to undergo at their hands.
When the doctor came he had to show his skill, not to bring back the dead man or woman to life again, but to adopt every precaution that he or she should do no such thing; or, if he or she did, he or she should be of very little use. The doctor had first to extract the brain through the nostrils with a curved probe, to make the head as empty as possible—supposing the head not to be empty already—and then to put in certain drugs. An incision being made in the side of the corpse, the intestines were drawn out, washed in palm wine, and covered with powdered aromatics. Sometimes they were restored to the body; sometimes deposited in vases, and laid in the same tomb. The body itself was filled with powdered myrrh, cassia, and other fragrant substances, and sewn up. This being done, it was kept in natron for seventy days; then washed, and wrapped in linen, of which a thousand yards were occasionally used. Thus prepared it was removed by the relations, placed in a wooden coffin, and, in the case of a wife or husband, retained at home until the time came for the second of the pair to undergo the same process, and then both were deposited together in a vault. A respectable funeral, thus carried out, would cost altogether more than 200l. A less costly way of preserving the body was simply to salt and dry it. Fire was never permitted to prey on the remains of the dead; and the idea of being contaminated by creeping things of any kind was horrible to the mind of an Egyptian. It was almost as keen as if
The dead could feel
The icy worm around them steal,
And shudder as the reptiles creep
To revel o’er their rotting sleep,
Without the power to scare away
Those cold consumers of their clay.
