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Show v UNITARIANS AND CREMATION. in his Sunday night lecture at Unity church, this city. Dr. Albert S. Bowers discussed cremation. crema-tion. He attempted to show that from every viewpoint, view-point, even from the religious, the custom of burying bury-ing the dead should be abandoned, and cremation take its place. Some of his arguments against .inhumation had merit, but their merit is based alone on the wisdom wis-dom of expediency. Experience teaches that cre-matiorf cre-matiorf is preferable to burial on battlefields or in plague-stricken cities, where large numbers of festering fes-tering bodies taint the atmosphere. The Catholic church, endowed with the traditions of the ages and venerating the customs of the primitive faithful, faith-ful, offers no obstacle to cremation if it is necessary to preserve the iifo or health of'the living. Rather does it urge, not to say permit, the burnin'g of dead bodies in such exceptional cases. The church departed de-parted from her ordinary rule in the great plague at Milan, in the battle of Gravelotte, and upon other extraordinary occasions. But our Unity lecturer was both sensational and ludicrous in fixing a time when the dead below would exceed the number of the quick on top of this terrestrial sphere. He had figures to prove it, of course. A person can prove almost anything any-thing with figures. With rare interruption, the children of men have been burying their dead from ' the creation of the world, which is a much longer span of time than Br. Bowers dure set for the end of the world, with all his figures and. statistics. One's imagination must be very vivid to draw up a 1-i' ture of persons dodging tombstones in their perambulations about town or around town; yet this is what. Dr. Bowers mentally creates in his i argument against burial of the dead. He would I be laughed out of court in Belgium, where there are more people to the square mile than any place : on earth: where people live and die as people peo-ple live and die here in Salt Lake; and where cemeteries ceme-teries should be as plentiful as grocery stores, if then.' is any argument in the figures and statistics j presented by our Unitarian friend. And, by the way. the great battle of Waterloo was fought in Bel-; Bel-; gium. We hover heard of a plague in Belgium. What Dr, Bowers had to say about the cold grave, the putrifying body, and its suggestion of ; horror in the human mind, will never reconcile thai j same mind to the spectacle of burning flesh. The psychological manifestations of the mind are un-exphunable. un-exphunable. Atfectiuii for our dead is as lasting as life. iueli'. There is consolation in the hearty work of planting flowers and watering graves which the scientific mind will never displace. The atheist ' and materialist condemn the custom as silly. Never ' mind, it will go on as il has gone on, and the world is all the better for it. Bui, seriously, as a naturalist or scientist, dues not Dr. Bowers err when he declaims against putrifying putri-fying bodies j Man. like the rest of the animal kingdom, returns to dust Returning to dust meats that he fructifies the earth and promotes the vegetation vege-tation which gives life to the quick, who follow him to the grave in the lapse of time. Dr. Bowers probably omitted mention of the Catholic church when he essayed to argue cremation crema-tion from the religious standpoint. Earth burial lias been consecrated by immemorial usage as part and parcel of one of the Church's most touching and impressive religious ceremonials a ceremonial ceremon-ial which inspire? the dying with hope and the bereaved be-reaved with consolation. By a decree dated May 17, Pope Leo XI 11 forbade Catholics to give, instructions for the cremation of their bodies after death, under pain of deprivation of the sacraments when dying and of religious obsequies when dead. This decree was partly based on veneration for the body which was once the temple of the Holy Ghost; partly on respect for the consecrated usage of the Church: purtly on the fact that, in Continental Europe, incineration of the dead was then, and is still, adopted by atheists and Freemasons as a public pub-lic expression of their disbelief in the resurrection and iu the life beyond the grave. |