Egyptian belief and modern thought / by James Bonwick.

  • James Bonwick
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Egyptian belief and modern thought / by James Bonwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    46/474 (page 32)
    But there were many inconveniences attending the mummy practice, besides the question of enormous charges, that would have presented great difficulties to the would- be reformers. Natural instincts had to be encountered. Cremation in Britain, notwithstanding the spread of know- ledge, and the apparently judicious reasons for its adop- tion, has now to contend with the prejudice of ages, i-icss than two thousand years ago men burnt bodies here ; but since then the public feeling has changed in favour of burial. Here, at once, we are met with the argument, that a change of religion effected a change in the treat- ment of the dead. The old-world idea of the sanctity of the corpse, cherished long before Roman and Greek cre- mation was exercised, entered the early Christian Church. It came with the revived conception of the resurrection of the body. To touch the corpse was defilement; but to burn it was a sacrilege, an interference with the opera- tions of Deity, who would in due time raise the body. For us, then, to resume cremation, we must first remove the feeling which sanctioned the entire safety of the body, and the prejudice which force of habit has begotten. The latter is harder to remove than the former. Though the Bishop of Lincoln still champions the theory of the resur- rection of the identical body, and condemns interference with the corpse, which worms or fishes may devour, yet the majority of thinking Christians doubtless read Paul differently. They see that he speaks of burying an earthly body to be raised a spiritual body; and they accept that spiritual rendering. With very many of us, therefore, it is not an Egyptian notion of the sanctity of the corpse that keeps us from cremating our friends, so much as a natural revulsion, arising from a long indulgence of another mode. Without doubt humanity is much the same in all