DR. J. W. POUCHER. 293 



Christians regarding the resurrection. At the cona- 

 mencement of the Christian era cremation was the prevail- 

 ing custom of the civilized world, with the exception of 

 Egypt, where bodies were embalmed ; Judea, where they 

 were buried in sepulchres, and China, where they were 

 buried in the earth. The Greeks, fifteen centuries before 

 Christ, invariably buried their dead ; but in time they 

 learned the advantages of cremation, which became uni- 

 versal. Suicides, unteethed children and persons struck 

 by lighting were, however, denied the right of being 

 cremated. The Romans, who had originally buried their 

 dead, borrowed in time the sanitary practice from the 

 Greeks, and from the close of the Republic to the end of 

 the fourth century of our era burning on the funeral pyre 

 was the usage regarded as most honorable and appro- 

 priate. But no sooner had the Christian religion gained 

 ascendancy in the state than its followers abolished this 

 practice, which they looked upon as a pagan custom. 



Another reason, as I have said before, contributing to 

 the restoration of earth burial, was the belief in the body's 

 resurrection. That the trumpet would sound and the 

 dead come forth, was a doctrine literally accepted in a 

 physical as well as in a spiritual sense. The supersti- 

 tious reverence in which the tombs of saints and their 

 mortal remains were held, enhanced, likewise, the predi- 

 lection of the Christians for inhumation. Gibbon says ; 

 " that in the age which followed the conversion of the 

 Emperor Constantine the emperors, the consuls and the 

 generals of the armies devoutly visited the sepulchres of 

 a tentmaker and a fisherman. 



The bodies of St. Andrew, St. Timothy, and St. Luke, 

 after reposing for three centuries in obscure graves, were 

 transported in solemn pomp to the Church of the Apos- 

 tles, which Constantine had founded on the banks of the 

 Bosphorus. When the relics of the prophet Samuel were 

 carried to Constantinople, an uninterrupted procession of 



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