Burial society

“ He gathered round him a few of the leading men of the day, who formed themselves into a Society for the Abolition of Burials in Towns, and he delivered a series of able lectures upon the subject and continued to make inquiries and to expose practices carried on in various grounds. ”

“ We want a Society for the Suppression of Erudite Research and the Decent Burial of the Past. The ghosts of the dead past want quite as much laying as raising. ”

“ With the upper classes, a corpse excites feelings of awe and respect; with the lower orders, in these districts, it is often treated with as little ceremony as the carcase in a butcher’s shop. Nothing can exceed their desire for an imposing funeral; nothing can surpass their efforts to obtain it; but the deceased’s remains share none of the reverence which this anxiety for their becoming burial would seem to indicate. ”

“ When death did visit a family the neighbors came to their assistance, comforted the bereaved, made the coffin, dug the grave, and conveyed the remains to its final resting place. The minister of the gospel directed the mourners to the true source of all comfort. Thus we assisted and comforted one another without compensation or cost. Now it requires a great deal of money to die and receive a Christian burial.
The first work of the pioneer was to build a house to shelter the family. ”

“ On the burial of any notorious character,—of a suicide, of a man who has perished by manslaughter, of a woman who has died in child-birth, or even of a child who has been killed by being run over in the street, this vulgar excitement rises to an insufferable height. If, in such a case, the corpse is brought into my church, this sacred and beautiful structure is desecrated and disfigured by the hurried intrusion of a squalid and irreverent mob, and clergyman, corpse, and mourners are jostled and mixed up with the confused mass, by the uncontrollable pressure from without. ”

“ Of course, some of these invalids succumb, and from time to time a death occurs; but a funeral is seldom or never seen. When a death happens, the hotel people keep it as long quiet as possible. The authorities take charge of the burial, and the body, which must lie unburied twenty-four hours after death, is removed in a coffin after dark to the mortuary adjoining the cemetery, where the relations assemble usually on the following day, and it is buried. ”

“ Wherefore all these last offices and ceremonies that concern the dead, the careful funeral arrangements, and the equipment of the tomb, and the pomp of obsequies, are rather the solace of the living than the comfort of the dead. If a costly burial does any good to a wicked man, a squalid burial, or none at all, may harm the godly. ”

“ If every individual promoter, male or female, of fifteen years old and upwards—without reference to the possession of property in any way—would, in view of the uncertainty of life, place such a request in his or her writing-desk, cremation would speedily prevail. The change from burial will otherwise be a protracted one, since few persons have enough strength of mind to run counter to the general custom, fearing the indignation of other relatives of the deceased. The weakest persons, however, have still a greater repugnance to doing anything contrary to the expressed wishes of the dead. ”

“ A lucky place and day have then to be fixed, by fortune-tellers, for the burial, and should these not be forthcoming, the coffin would be placed on a hill till they can be found. Burial is considered of so much importance, that should a man be drowned his spirit would be called back into a figure of wood or paper, and buried with pomp. Before the grave-diggers begin their work, members of the family worship the genii of the mountain, and write letters to these gods, asking them to be so kind as to allow the funeral to take place. ”

“ No more grave robberies in the twentieth century. The old style of burial becomes a back number. Popular errors about Cremation removed. Undertakers at a discount. Costly funerals discouraged. Funeral etiquette in 1999. No person buried alive in the twentieth century. Sacred memories of the dead still jealously treasured. “Rented graves” and other burial abominations of the nineteenth century are forever banished.
The great innovation of the twentieth century which long rankled within the human breast, but finally uprooted and conquered prejudice, was cremation. ”

“ A dead body is shunned. Therefore, a shroud is prepared, and other paraphernalia of burial, in order that the survivors may cease to loathe. At death, there is a sacrifice of wine and meat; when the funeral cortege is about to start, there is another; and after burial there is yet another. Yet no one ever saw the spirit of the departed come to taste of the food.
“These have been our customs from remote antiquity. They have not been discarded, because, in consequence, men no more shun the dead. What you may censure in those who perform the ceremonial is no blemish in the ceremonial itself.” ”

“ Not that alone, but cremation removed from earth the most horrible experience that can be endured by mortal man and that is premature burial. The practice of burying bodies is a relic of barbarism. Its horrors and possibilities are [166] without limit. No civilized community should tolerate it. Custom and tradition are the forces that maintain it. It does not possess a single point in its favor, while, on the other hand, there are scores of sound arguments against it.
No person who ever spent a minute in the fierce temperature of a crematory ever Can’t Bury them Alive. ”

“ The little account that appears to have been at any time made of the feelings of the labouring classes, and the burial after dissection, of the poor dying in hospitals, without funereal rites, the almost total omission of any marks of sympathy or respect towards their remains,—cannot but have a most demoralizing effect on the survivors. ”

“ Bodies of stalwart workmen lie beside the remains of refined ladies, many of whom are still decked with costly earrings and have jewels glittering on the fingers. Rich and poor throng these quarters and gaze with awe-struck faces at the masses of mutilations in the hope of recognizing a missing one, so as to accord the body a decent burial. ”

“ If he died intestate, the quinquennales, or magistrates of the municipium, and the people generally, were to direct how the funeral should take place. If any member of the college in the condition of a slave should die, and his body, through the unjust conduct of his master or mistress, should not be given up for burial, his funeral should be celebrated by his bust being carried in procession. No funeral of a suicide was to take place. ”

“ There were so many fatal cases happening that the authorities of the city did not stop to give them a decent burial. The dead-cart used to go through the street where the poor lived, and the bodies were carried away for burial. ”

“ Every death is not only a drain on the immediate family, but on their friends, who are supposed to turn out and give “the corpse a decent burial.” The decent burial means coaches, flowers and whiskey. The most casual observer must notice the giant part liquor plays, in the lives of the poor. ”

“ If the guardians of consecrated sepulchres, in which people have paid an honest fee to be buried, are to dig them up and cart them off as in England, or make a show of them as here, why, I can only say that cremation will gain a good many converts. Any one would prefer urn burial to the chance of being thus made a spectacle. So good, too, it must be for the rising population to take off the edge of any salutary horror they may feel at death and decay, or of reverence for the dead. ”

“ At a burial there is but darkness, at a cremation rosy light unaccompanied by fustiness; the dead is really reduced to ashes, and with him the time-honored saying, “Peace to his ashes,” is not a hollow phrase, as it is with those who are interred.
Those who do not wish to miss religious and other ceremonies at incinerations may use any form of burial service they like, and those who desire to dispense with them may do so. And those who already have beloved dead in the cemeteries may rest by their side when the end is come, for the ashes can be interred as well as the body. ”

“ In the most remote epoch of the world’s history we find that the dead were treated with respect, not to say worshipped; for a natural, sentiment leads savage as well as civilised man to pay the last tribute of affection to the bodies of those for whom he once felt affection, esteem, or fear. Such is the moral principle of the various modes of burial which have been successively practised, viz., embalming, incineration, and interment. ”

“ In burial customs, with their numerous little superstitious observances, the survival of folk-memory is well displayed. It is needless to repeat the evidence here—how, in recent years, objects have been surreptitiously, and even openly, buried with the dead; how the funeral feast, in an attenuated form, lingers on; how we still scrupulously don the funeral garb, once the sign of deprecation or fear; how graveyard teeth are used as charms and remedies. ”

“ Assembled in the burial ground round the same grave, or disposed in groups by the side of graves within a reasonable distance of each other, they form a picture of the same affecting and impressive character. If the sympathy of a public assembly is perceptible or intense in proportion to the numbers that compose it, this aggregation of burials need only be limited by the effective power of the human voice. ”

“ By the present law of England, the provision made for the burial of the dead is of a twofold nature. In most of the towns and considerable populations, there are cemeteries in which Churchmen and non-Churchmen have equal rights of sepulture according to the rites of the community to which they respectively belong. ”

“ Nothing equals the care which they take in the burial of their dead. As soon as a native has breathed his last, the neighbours are informed, and immediately all the women come to weep about the corpse. ”

“ He must be buried as "society" is buried. He must have a fashionable funeral. He must, to the last, bear witness to the power of Mrs. Grundy. It is to please her, that the funeral cloaks, hatbands, scarves, mourning coaches, gilded hearses, and processions of mutes are hired. And yet, how worthless and extravagant is the mummery of the undertaker's grief; and the feigned woe of the mutes, saulies, and plume bearers, who are paid for their day's parade! ”

“ It would be supremely foolish to object to the burning of the dead on the score of its being completely a heathen practice, and as if burial in the ground was not at one time open to the same objection. ”

“ In all the short and simple annals of the poor nothing, usually, is shorter and simpler than the funeral of one of them. For the putting away underground of the odd-jobs man perhaps thirty persons of his own walk in life assembled, attesting their sympathies by their presence. But the daughter of the deceased neither attended the brief services at the place of his late residence nor rode to the cemetery to witness the burial. ”

“ The burial system is thus a compromise between the old graveyard usages to which England has been accustomed for a thousand years or more, and the very un-English process of cremation which has a few advocates among us. ”

“ Concerning Burial of the Dead, all customs of praying, reading, and singing, both in going to or from the grave, are said to have been greatly abused. The simple direction is therefore given, that when any person departeth this life, let the body upon the day of burial be decently attended from the house to the place appointed for public burial, and there immediately interred without any ceremony. ”

“ Accordingly at a great festival the bodies of all who have died within a certain time are dug up and the decaying flesh scraped from the bones. Comparing these ideas, I suggested that they may explain the widespread custom of a second burial, that is, the practice of disinterring the dead after a certain time and disposing of their bones otherwise. ”

“ In some cemeteries corpses are allowed to remain in a grave only a stipulated time; in English burial-grounds, where a freehold right is not secured, the remains may rest undisturbed but seven, in France five, years. ”

“ In days when land is dear, and burial rights are less sacred than the rights of builders and contractors, coffins have been opened with the pickaxe, in the act of converting cemeteries into streets and gardens. Here a grave has been discovered whose inmate has turned in its shroud; here a corpse clutching its hair in a strained and unnatural position: dead men and dead women lying in their graves as dead men never lie in a Christian land at the moment of burial. ”

“ It was thought all the better if, during the burial, one of the attendant mourners could be stunned by a club, and dropped, still breathing, into the grave before it was filled in. In the case of a great lady dying, slave-girls were the victims. ”

“ You are horrified when you read about this savage burial. You wonder at the superstitious ignorance that allows ten girls to be buried alive, and thousands of young men to be slaughtered, merely in honor of a murdered queen and her brutal son. But considering the knowledge of those savages and our knowledge to-day, their education and our education, we find that we are entitled to no excessive praise. The funerals to-day are often comparatively as ridiculous and uncivilized, though the tendency is certainly toward better things. ”