LECTURES.

LECTURE I.

INTRODUCTORY.

On Burial, considered as a Religious Rite.

GENESIS iii. 19.

"IN THE SWEAT OF THY FACE SHALT THOU EAT BREAD, TILL THOU RETURN UNTO THE GROUND; FOR OUT OF IT WAST THOU TAKEN: FOR DUST THOU ART, AND UNTO DUST SHALT THOU RETURN."

In these words we hear the sentence of our race, the most awful part of that curse pronounced on Adam, when, by his disobedience, he had drawn upon himself, and upon all who in time to come should be the issue of his loins, the just vengeance of an offended God. He, who had been created in the image of his Maker, had marred himself and the object

B

for which he was created; he had become corrupted and polluted; had made a covenant with Satan, and brought sin into the world, and thus had infected and tainted the whole material creation around him. The very pressure of his foot spread contagion, for the earth on which he trod was rendered sterile by it; "the ground" was "cursed for his sake," and thorns and thistles were henceforth to smother and choke up those fruits of the soil which hitherto had sprung up spontaneously. And against himself the decree went forth that labour and pain were to be the future companions of his existence; that by the sweat of his brow he should win the bread which he should eat in sorrow; that exhaustion should follow labour, and decay should be the successor of pain, till his days on earth should be brought to a close, and the remainder of his sentence be inflicted by that severance of the soul from the body by temporal death, which was yet but a feeble type of that more awful severance of the disembodied soul from the presence of God, in which penalty lay the sting of death eternal. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat

bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

And so at his appointed time Adam died; and so from Adam's day to our own, and from our own even to the end of the world, all men have died, or will die,—every man in his own order. "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." High and low, rich and poor, one with another, the exaction of the sentence has been universal,—the body in which men have sinned, that same body has been sown "in weakness,"" in dishonour," "in corruption." Whether in infancy or childhood, in manhood or old age, sooner or later, the summons has gone forth, and man has been borne to his long home: the dust has returned to the earth as it was: and the spirit has returned to God Who gave it.

Yes, though as innumerable as the multitudes who have died, have been their several modes of death; though of myriads of our race the fire hath had his part, and the deep waters their's; though the bones of myriads

have been bleached under scorching suns, or entombed amid arctic snows, or scattered and dissipated in vapours by the winds of heaven, yet sooner or later, by some process or other, the disintegrated forms have been resolved into their original element;-earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

And hence the feeling seems to have become natural to man, that the earth was the fitting place in which to deposit that vessel of clay which the soul had quitted; that when it was needful to remove the dead out of sight, lest nature should be outraged by witnessing the loathsome process of corruption, earth was the meetest element wherewith earth should be mingled, that we should, as it has been expressed, “return to the embrace of our first mother."

And though there have been nations who committed their departed friends to the funeral pile instead of the grave, the motive which led to this act was rather the result of. refinement than of natural feeling. To them death brought no thoughts of a future resurrection of the body, and, therefore, they were

glad to adopt a plan by which the less perishable parts of those whom they had loved while living, might still be preserved to them, and when consigned to the funeral urn, might still be the visible representative of the once living object on which their attachment had been concentrated.

The natural feeling, has ever been that the grave is the fitting receptacle for the dead, and that they who die should be buried. It is true that Scripture has given us no record of the entombment of those who died before the flood, and the wild legend which some of you may, perhaps, have fallen in with, that the bones of Adam were taken into the ark by Noah, and buried by him after the waters of the deluge had abated, upon that very mountain of Moriah or Calvary,—and, upon the self-same spot, in which both Abraham raised the knife to slay his son, and where, in after-times, the Cross of Christ was reared,' bears on its face the

1 See Poole's Synopsis; Gen. xxii. 2. "Mons Moria in plures calles dissectus erat: in una parte erat Sion, in qua arx David, juxta quam templum extructum. Alia pars extra urbem mansit posteaque dicta est Mons Calvariæ, in quo tam