That some curious heredity of faith does act on the nineteenth century Christian mind—at least when that mind is episcopal—may be surmised from the ground set forth by Dr. Wordsworth, late Bishop of Lincoln, as that on which he founded his antagonism to the wholesome and decent disposal of the bodies of the dead by cremation. The Bishop alleged that the destruction of the body by fire would tend to produce doubt in the minds of the faithful touching the resurrection of the flesh; and he certainly thereby showed some obscure idea that the very body placed in the grave had some future resurrection in store for it. Yet he must most surely have known that the work wrought swiftly by the flames in the crematorium is slowly, but no less completely, wrought on the buried corpse beneath the ground; and that while the one is more manifest to the eye than is the other, the ultimate result differs not.
The later Jews and the Egyptians—from both of which nations Christianity took much of its creed—were firm believers in the absolute resurrection of the body. The curious vision of the valley of dry bones, narrated in Ezekiel xxxvii., may be taken as a partial rehearsal of the expected resurrection drama. And the Jews held the curious fancy that one very hard bone in the human skeleton—named from this belief the os sacrum, or holy bone—never suffered decay, but remained as a nucleus for the resurrection body; which would be formed therefrom, I presume, as Eve was formed from out a rib. The Egyptians did not trust to a single bone; they preferred to ensure the continuance of the whole body. Hence their custom of embalming the dead, so that the spirit on the resurrection-morning might not fail of lodgment in its own dwelling-place. And I cannot help thinking that if there is really to be a resurrection of the flesh, the Egyptians were far more rational than modern-day Christians. For under the present plan, we use up our ancestors' bodies for the building of our own frames, as countrymen use the stones from ruined castles to make walls for their fields; and it will be no more possible for everyone to reclaim the materials which erstwhile formed his body, than it would be to build up both castle and walls at the same moment out of the same stones.
Apart, however, from any of these fables of the resurrec-
