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science teach us if not this", whether we bury or cremate our dead, the 

 ultimate result is the same— though the process in one case may take 

 20year8 and the other bat an hour. But those of you who reject the 

 flame because of the sudden destruction of the body, pause and think 

 what takes place in that cold and dismal grave. We often hear of 

 respected ones being placed in their "last resting place," but the grave 

 is no place of rest. The moment life has passed away and before the 

 body has yet been buried, a new life has begun, myriads of micro- 

 organisms have set to work to resolve that body into the elements of 

 Nature. 



In Nature's harmonious cycle of developement it is imperative that 

 that body must be dissolved so as to become plant life, and so we 

 ultimately find that after a long and slow process that it has been 

 resolved into carbonic acid, ammonia, water, and mineral elements. 

 Now this is just exactly what happens when we destroy a body by fire, 

 but in the case of burial there is great risk of doing injury to the living, 

 while with cremation there is absolutely no such risk. If then the 

 ultimate result of burying or cremating dead bodies is the same, why 

 should we run the risk of mischief being done to the living if the same 

 end can be accomplished without that risk by another method — more 

 imple, more economic, and altogether quite as reverent ? Is it not 

 enough to do harm to others while we live without having any wish to 

 inflct injury after death ? 



Religious objections. — I have already told you that on the advent of 

 Christianity that cremation was looked upon as heathenish and against 

 the Christian idea of the resurrection; others object to it because the 

 body of our Saviour was not so treated, but we must not forget that our 

 Saviour was a Jew and that the manner of the Jews is to bury. But 

 even with the Jews cremation was not unknown, as I have already told 

 you. We may dispose of this argument simply by saying if we are to 

 take the burial of our Saviour's body as being the right way, then we 

 ought to bury in sepulchres. 



I need not offer any opinion of my own relative to this objection; 

 true it is that Bishop W T ords worth did say ''some weak minded 

 brethren " might have their belief shaken in the doctrine of the 

 resurrection, but the reply of the late Lord Shaftesbury to such an 

 objection was unanswerable. In a letter to Sir Spencer Wells he dis- 

 poses of this objection simply by asking " What then will become of the 

 blessed martyrs who have died at the stake in ancient and modern 

 persecutions ?" 



The late Bishop Fraser, who was deeply interested in the cremation 

 movement, speaking at Bolton in 1874, said : "The ancient Romans 

 believed in immortality, and yet they believed in the burning of the 

 bodies of their dead. Urn burial was quite as decent as the practice of 

 interment for anything he saw, and urns containing the ashes of the 

 dead were more picturesque than ceffine. Could they suppose that it 

 would be mere impossible for God to raise up a body at the resurrection. 

 if needs be, out of elementary particles which had been liberated by the 

 burning, than it would be to raise up a body from dust and from the 

 elements of bodies which had passed into the structure of worms ? 



" The omnipotence of God is not limited, and He would raise the dead, 

 whether He had to raise our bodies out of churchyards, or whether He 

 would have to call our remains 1 , like the remains of some ancient Romans 

 out of an urn in which they were deposited 2,000 years ago." Speaking 

 again in 1879, he said : "No intelligent faith can suppose that any 

 Christian doctrine is affected by the manner in which this mortal body 

 of ours crumbles into dust and sees corruption." 



Canon Liddon, preaching in St. Paul's, London, stated, " The resur- 

 rection of a body from its ashes is not a greater miracle than the resur- 

 rection of an unburnt body ; each must be purely miraculous." 



