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Page 14
It may now be asked: "Granting that these evils are inseparable from the
burial of the dead in the earth or in tombs, what is the remedy? What
else can be done?"
To this question not many answers can be given, because the modes of
disposing of the dead have always been and must always be few.
Plainly, no such novel mode as casting the dead into the sea will be
generally adopted. Plainly, also, the mode of the Parsees, grounded as
it is in ancient, if not original use--to give the dead to beasts and
birds--will not become universal. And, plainly also, cremation will not
be welcome to the many, free as it is from objection on the score of
public health, if a method equally sanitary, and at the same time
satisfactory to a reverent and tender sentiment, can be devised.
The inquiry, then, has reached its limit; for, apart from the modes that
have just been named, there are no others but earth-burial and
entombment, and earth-burial, as we have seen, cannot be made sanitary
under common conditions. Therefore, if the demands of affection and
sanitation are both to be met, entombment is to do it, or it cannot be
done.
Happily, better than any other method of disposing of the dead that has
ever been devised, entombment has met the demand of affection. Never has
any other mode so commended itself to men as this. There may have been
at times a general adoption of cremation, and there may have been a
general prevalence of earth-burial, but the one has not long satisfied
the sorrowing survivors, and the other has owed its beginning and
continuance to the apparent absence of alternative. Wherever the living
have been able, and the dead have been dearly loved or highly esteemed,
the tendency to entomb and not to bury has been constantly manifested.
To call attention to this tendency is enough to prove it, so easily
accessible is the evidence and so familiar is its operation in the human
heart. The most natural reference will be, first, to the mausoleum, the
tomb of Mausolus, that was erected by his sorrowing Queen, Artemisia, at
Halicarnassus, upon the �gean's eastern shore, and that became at once
one of the few great wonders of the ancient world. This was intended to
do honor to the loved and illustrious dead, and this it did as no grave
or pyre could do. This was also intended to protect the lifeless form
from ruthless robbery and reckless profanation, and it performed this
task so well that for near two thousand years no human eye beheld the
mortal part of Mausolus, and no human hand disturbed its rest. At a far
earlier time, Abraham, the Father of the Faithful, while he illustrated
this tendency to entomb the dead, also offered an influential example to
all who would do him reverence, as, in the hour of his great sorrow, he
sought the seclusion and the security of Machpelah's cave for the last
earthly resting-place of his beloved wife. There he buried Sarah; there
he and his son and his son's son and their wives were all laid to rest,
and the place of their repose hath not been violated even at this
distant day. To this constant tendency constant testimony is borne by
the massive and magnificent tombs in which India abounds, the tombs and
pyramids that make marvellous the land of the Nile, the tombs that stood
thick upon the Appian Way, and that rose superb upon the Tiber's shore,
the modern use to which the Pantheon is put, the Panth�on at Paris and
the Crypt of the Invalides, the Abbey of Westminster, matchless in
memorials, the sepulchres within the hills that gird Jerusalem, and the
sepulchre in which the Nazarene was gently laid when His agony was
ended.
It remains to be considered whether entombment can be made sanitary. If
it can be the problem is solved, for entombment has ever been the best
that the living could do for their dead, and, with the added advantage
of promoting, or ceasing to be prejudicial to, the public health
entombment will be the choice of all whom cost or caprice does not
deter.
That entombment can be made sanitary is evident from the fact that in
countless instances, in many lands and through long periods of time, it
has been made sanitary by the ingenuity of man or by unassisted nature;
and it is also evident from the fact that decomposition and disease
germs are the dangers to be guarded against, and that against these both
ancient and modern science have been able to guard. Not to enumerate all
the modes that have been chanced upon or that have been devised by men,
there are two that have been notable and are available for modern
use--embalming and desiccation.
It is a delusion to imagine that embalming is a lost art; that, like
some other marvels of the ancient time, this is a secret process that
perished with the people who employed it. Did we desire it, we could
embalm our princes and our priests, and retain their shrunken
similitudes for distant coming times to gaze and gape upon, as skilfully
as they who practised this art in Egypt's palmiest days. Nay, it is
doubtless far within the truth to claim that better than they did we
could do; and we are actually apprised of better methods and results
than they employed or could attain, and it is not unlikely that we
shall hear of better methods still. But Egypt's method, or its modern
counterpart, will hardly now be popular. It involves too much mutilation
and too much transformation. When it has done its work little is left
but bone and muscular tissue, and these are so transfused with foreign
substances that a form moulded from plastic matter or sculptured from
stone could almost as truly be considered that of the lamented dead as
this. Moreover, indefinite preservation of the dead is not desirable,
and is not desired. The uses to which the Egyptian Pharaohs and their
humbler subjects have been put in these days of indelicacy and
unscrupulousness in the pursuit of science or sordid gain are not such
as to make many eager to be preserved for a similar disposition when the
present shall have become a similarly distant past.
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