Cemetery interment Author:George Collison Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. MODERN CEMETERIES. As time has rolled onward in its course, each succeeding age has produced its " thick cloud of witnesses " in favour of the ... more »practice of Cemetery Interment, and it by no means adds to the fame of British statistics, that the metropolis and the large cities and manufacturing towns of the kingdom, should have been so slow to adopt, or dull in appreciating, the advantages of suburban sepulture. The French nation led the way in providing those beautiful and quiet places of rest for the dead, for which not only their capital, but their provincial cities and towns are so justly celebrated ; and it is to the lasting credit and praise of the Gallican church, that every aid has been voluntarily given by its bishops and clergy, in furtherance of these most useful objects. In perusing the various ordinances which the- French archbishops and bishops have promulgated in their respective sees, denouncing and forbidding interment in churches, or within the walls of towns, extending in chronological orderfrom the decree of De Pericard, Bishop of Avranches, A.d. 1600, to the date of that beautiful ordinance of the Archbishop of Toulouse, which we have presented to our readers in the last chapter, we find the most anxious care for the physical and moral health of the people prompting every effort: nor do we read a line respecting the vested interests of priests in the dead bodies of their/locks ; or that, before the legislature of the kingdom would endow a public cemetery with the special privileges of " an act," each poor corpse brought within its precincts must be subject to the lien of the incumbent of the parish from which it might have been removed, to a mortuary fee, corresponding in amount with the rank of the deceased. It is our object in pursuin...« less