26 
THE MODERN CEMETERY. 
norant of what is the clear testimony of science in 
the matter. Already Chicago has overrun several 
sets of cemeteries. The one redeeming feature of 
a city cemetery is that the dead are made to serve 
the living by holding ground for awhile, which 
eventually will be wrenched from them and given 
back to the living in the way of parks. 
What is the remedy for all this danger and ex- 
pense, this idle land, these plague-breeding homes 
of the dead? Happily for us there is a solution 
of this perplexity, a solution that is at once econom- 
ic, effective, simple, beautiful. A solution that 
meets at once the requirements of sentiment and of 
science. I mean the prompt restoration of the 
body to its primal elements by the quick and 
pure element of fire, — the modern crematory. 
Scientifically speaking, inhumation and incineration 
accomplish exactly the same results. Decomposi- 
tion is but slow combustion. Combustion is but 
prompt decomposition. In an hour’s time there is 
left but a few pounds of ashes, which are gathered 
in an urn, preserved in the crematory, given to the 
friends for burial, or, more fitting and beautiful as 
it seems to me, scattered upon the grass, — and na- 
ture has accomplished in one hour by fire what it 
would take from twelve to sixty years to accom- 
plish by inhumation; for with mawkish sentimental- 
ity we stupidly contest with nature and retard her 
processes as much as possible by our embalmings 
and metalic cases. I hope the reform will progress, 
until by law every cemetery shall be required to of- 
fer this alternative to its patrons. I hope the re- 
form in our funeral customs will go on; that our 
street car companies all over the country will fol- 
low the example of the Atchison street railway by 
putting at the service of the public a funeral car, 
which may be chartered at a less cost than a hearse 
and which will carry forty attendants at the price 
which must now be paid for the carrying of four. 
I hope these funeral reforms will go on until white 
and not black will be the symbol of the great mys- 
tic nuptial occasion where death woos and wins its 
groom or bride. Let the funeral reforms go on un- 
til the consolation of the bereaved will be found in 
services of love. 
But these reforms will not come any faster than 
does the growth of reason in religion. They can- 
not come as long as men in the toils of a mediaeval 
theology tremble in the presence of death as in the 
presence of an arch-fiend, and go about this world 
with an ever open ear listening for the crack of 
doom, when in response to Gabriel’s trumpet the 
ghastly graves are to open and the wasted bodies 
come forth crawling from under the crushing tons 
of granite which their successors and kindred osten- 
tatiously piled upon them. These funeral reforms 
will never come so long as men regard this world 
accursed and deem the only glory over there. So 
long as they think that it is one thing to prepare to 
die and another to prepare to live. 
Dr. Charles W. Purdy, before the Chicago Med- 
ical Society some years ago, offered the following 
as a careful estimate: “One and one-fourth times 
more money is expended annually for funerals in 
the United States than the government expends for 
public school purposes. Funerals cost this country 
in 1880 enough to pay all commercial liabilities in 
the United States during the year and to give each 
bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to resume 
business. Funerals cost annually more money than 
the value of the combined gold and silver yield of 
the United States in 1880.’’ Now this is not a case 
of bad financiering nor of bad morals; primarily it 
is a case of bad theology. It is fetichism. It is 
superstition. It is the slavishness of dogma. 
What we want is to emancipate souls. Out of a pe- 
tition of 23,365 Germans to the Reichstag for a law 
permitting cremation, there were only ten names of 
Protestant ministers appended, and three of rabbis. 
We must give to the world the sweeter thought of 
nature, of diviner trust in God, a holier calm in the 
presence of the inevitable, more restfulness in the 
eternal arms. We want a new emphasis on charac- 
ter, not on show or creed. We want to realize the 
truth which dear old Sir Thomas Browne stated 
over two hundred years ago in his “Urn Burial.’’ 
In this he says: “There is no antidote against the 
opium of time. Our fathers find their graves in our 
short memories. Gravestones tell truth scarcely 
forty years. To be nameless in worthy deeds ex- 
ceeds an infamous history. The greater part must 
be content to be found in the register of God, not 
in the record of man. Egyptian ingenuity was van- 
ity, feeding the wind and folly. Mummy has be- 
come merchandise. Mizraim cures wounds and Pha- 
raoh is sold for balsam. Five languages secured 
not the epitaph of Giordanus.” 
“The noblest monument in Graceland,” said 
the superintendent, “is the great elm that was mov- 
ed fifteen miles to mark the resting place of the man 
that loved it.” It will outlast your granite shaft. 
O let us have done with the miserable graveyard 
business; let us not think of death but of life. Let 
the dead bury the dead. Selfishness in tears is no 
more noble than selfishness in smiles. Let the tears 
of the sorrowing be illumined with love and they 
become crystaline lenses showing forth in magnified 
and clearer outline the present duty, the near op- 
portunity, the deathless life, the endless love, the 
life in God, with man, for truth, the life that is free 
from the terrors of the grave, the life that is now 
eternal, triumphant and ever blessed. 
