ART. VIII. THE BURIALS QUESTION: Mr. Marten's Burials Act. A Full and Concise Explanation of the Public Health (Interments) Act, 1879, with I. The Clauses of the Public Health Act, 1875, and Cemeteries Clauses Act, 1847, relating thereto; and II. The Letter of the Secretary to the Local Government Board to the Sanitary Authorities on the Act. (London Church Defence Institution, 9 Bridge Street, Westminster, S.W.) LORD BEACONSFIELD expressed the exact truth when, in speaking a year or two back of the Burials question, he declared it to be, not an ecclesiastical, but a sanitary one. Suppose the case of any district or neighbourhood being destitute of any convenient means of burial for its dead, would its remedy lie against the nearest (or any) representative of the ecclesiastical establishment of the country, against the incumbent or the churchwardens of this or that parish? We all know that it would not. That clergymen, or other Churchmen, when existing churchyards have been no longer available, have continually given or obtained adjoining or additional land for their parishioners' or neighbours' benefit, and had it consecrated as was the original portion, is no answer to what we have stated. Every such action has been absolutely free and unconstrained, and had no such land been thus given or obtained in connection with the Church, we all know that neither clergy nor churchwardens, still less any non-official Churchman, could have been compelled to stir a finger in the matter. And not only could they not, but throughout all the legislation upon the subject of the last thirty years and more, no suggestion of any such duty resting upon the Church, even conventionally, has ever been made. Every interference on the part of the State with the Church upon this subject has been to limit her existing action in the matter, not to impose new and unheard-of liabilities upon her. The State has thus far always acted upon strictly sanitary principles, and its interference has been upon sanitary grounds, i.e. whenever it has interfered it has been to prohibit the further use of the Church's burial-grounds where prejudicial to the health of the community, and to facilitate the provision of other new and altogether distinct places of sepulture. So far has this: process of limitation gone that a few years back it was found that fully two-thirds of our population were dependent upon what we may designate as Act of Parliament cemeteries through the compulsory closing of Church burying-places; not more than eight millions being resident in districts where the grounds attached to churches or to Dissenting chapels afforded still the only means of burial. And, considering the continuous increase of the urban, and the corresponding steady though slower diminution of the rural, population, the proportion of those who have only 'cemeteries' to make use of must by this time have become even greater. When, therefore, the Liberation Society and its parliamentary advocates began not long ago to claim the remnant of the churchyards as 'national' burying-places, and to propose certain new and till then unheard-of measures respecting their use, the reply was natural and immediate. It was answered that in the case of all those for whom, on whatever grounds, sanitary or other, the churchyards were no longer available, the claim for a remedy lay against the State. Burial of the dead is primarily a sanitary necessity; and as such it is one of the functions of a well-administered State to see to its fulfilment; just as much as the State attends to the road-making or the bridge-building needful for the inhabitants of its territory. To say that because the Church has, from time immemorial, undertaken the Christian burial of her members, therefore she is bound to afford means of sepulture to every member of the community, would be almost as if, because in days gone by bridge-building was one of the public works of mercy largely undertaken by great ecclesiastical corporations, therefore the Church ought to supply a nation with bridges. In fact, the burial of the dead holds an analogous place to many other of those incidents of the life of man in society of which the double aspect has of late years come to be more distinctly recognised, as the separate State organisation has become more complete and as the spiritual nature of the Church has become more insisted on. A man is born into the world-it is the office of the State to see that he is duly enrolled as a member of the nation, i.e. to provide for his 'registration:' the Church baptizes him into the Kingdom of God. He marries-it is the function of the State to provide that every marriage is contracted in proper order, publicly known and attested, for the due protection alike of persons and of property, with the care of which the State is chargeable. The Church looks upon marriage upon another side, and to her members, the members of the Kingdom of God, she offers holy matrimony, and in her registers she enrols the married pair, not only as persons who have entered upon the marriage contract, but as those whom God has joined. The fact that, while our populations were comparatively sparse, and the Church practically co-extensive with the nation, the State accepted the Church's registers as the sufficient national documents on such matters, does not alter their inherent significance. The enormous growth of population, and the increasing religious variations of that population, have compelled the State to perfect its own separate organisation in these respects as in many others; and that the resulting changes should require some readjustment of functions in which the Church and the State formerly overlapped, or interacted, is only natural. Many of us can remember the uncomfortable feelings excited when first the State provided its own registration of births, and its own provision for civil marriage. We have learned since then how much both these measures have tended to throw into stronger relief the spiritual meaning of the Church's action in baptism and in holy matrimony. It is under somewhat different circumstances that the matter of burial is approached, but the lesson is similar, and it is now the Church's turn to point out that an office which the State was quite right in assuming in respect of birth and marriage-that same duty, mutatis mutandis, must also rest upon the State in respect of burial. To provide for the interment of her citizens as a sanitary act, to arrange for the recording of their deaths as a matter of civil importance, these are properly the subject matter of civil administration and government. To add Christian burial to civil interment, to celebrate, and to record, the departure of one more member of the Church militant to join the numbers of the Church expectant, and while so doing to lift her voice in solemn witness to the fact of the joyful resurrection in the future this is the Church's action, and a high and forwardlooking function it is, and touched with rays of brightness from that morning towards which her face is ever turned. If all the weary controversies of the last few years may, under God's providence, only terminate in teaching Church people 1 People very largely forget the enormously increased elaborateness of the whole administrative organisation of the Government necessitated by the great increase of population during the last eighty years. It is not in one department only, but in all. In fact the wheels of English life would stand still to-morrow were its administrative organisation reduced to what it was in the days-say, of William Pitt. generally to appreciate duly the mighty difference between civil interment and Christian burial, as they have learned to regard with deeper reverence the spiritual nature of the Church's action in the two other cases which we have specified, we may be willing to recognise our recent vexations as only one more instance of blessings in disguise, and to look with calmer feelings on other existing complications which look like dangers, but may in like manner be the heralds of better things to come. But it is time that we turn to the actual matter of fact, and recent parliamentary history, which have started these reflections. We will not go back over the thrice-told tale of the attacks upon our churchyards, their motive, their management, and what not. In an article in this periodical of January 1877, their history down to that date was fully dealt with, and since that time there has been comparatively little to chronicle save the great remonstrance of some 15,000 clergy or thereabouts, which, about the Whitsuntide of that year, did so much to arrest the threatening tide of aggression. In the course of the recent session, a private member, Mr. A. G. Marten, M.P. for Cambridge, and who, we believe, had previously ventilated his scheme in the Conference of his diocese-that of Ely-introduced for the second time the Bill which, vigorously supported by the Government, has now become law, and which proceeds upon the sound principles above enunciated, that, so far as the civil action is concerned, burial is to be treated as a branch of sanitary legislation, that the State is bound to see that its members are provided with proper facilities for interment, and that any legislation on the subject should be perfectly general, and keep clear of ecclesiastical considerations. We may mention in passing, only to contradict it emphatically, that the Nonconformist newspaper has spoken of the Bill having passed the House of Commons by a kind of 'dodge.' Nothing can be more imaginary. The Bill had been before the House in 1878. It was introduced a second time in 1879, it passed through all its stages, with, of course, all the usual notices being given, and two divisions were taken on it on the third reading. The Bill is brief, and as it may be convenient to our readers to have it before them, we print it in extenso: -- 'Public Health (Interments) Act, 1879.—42 & 43 Vict. c. 31. 'An Act to amend the Public Health Act, 1875, as to Interments. July 21, 1879: 'Be it enacted by the Queen's most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows (that is to say): '1. This Act may be cited as the Public Health (Interments) Act, 1879, and shall be construed as one with the Public Health Act, 1875, in this Act called the Principal Act. 2. (1.) The provisions of the Principal Act as to a place for the reception of the dead before interment, in the Principal Act called a mortuary, shall extend to a place for the interment of the dead, in this Act called a cemetery; and the purposes of the Principal Act shall include the acquisition, construction, and maintenance of a cemetery. (2.) A local authority may acquire, construct, and maintain a cemetery either wholly or partly within or without their district, subject as to works without their district for the purpose of a cemetery to the provisions of the Principal Act as to sewage works by a local authority without their district. ‘(3.) A local authority may accept a donation of land for the purpose of a cemetery, and a donation of money or other property for enabling them to acquire, construct, or maintain a cemetery. '3. The Cemeteries Clauses Act, 1847, shall be incorporated with this Act.' The reader will observe at once that this is an Act to EXTEND to cemeteries those provisions of an Act for the public health, by which public mortuaries, or places for the reception of the dead while awaiting interment, were for the first time provided for. This Act was a large general Act of very various scope, and how fittingly such a provision was introduced into it, none know better than the clergy, who are well acquainted with the violations at once of decency and of regard for health which occur in the crowded homes of the poor where mortuaries are not to be had. The completeness and the workableness of the arrangements under which, since 1875, they can be supplied, were of themselves almost enough to suggest their extension to the case of cemeteries. It was but applying to the case of the permanent, the same machinery and the same principles as had been found satisfactory in the case of the temporary, resting-places of the departed. The only other matter to be noticed is, that, inasmuch as there already existed an Act consolidating the existing legislation respecting cemeteries, called the 'Cemeteries Clauses Act,' passed in 1847, this extension of the 'mortuary clauses' of the Act of 1875 to cemeteries must be made in conformity with what we may call the 'cemetery legislation' already in force. Accordingly, by its third clause, Mr. Marten's Act incorporates the Cemetery Clauses Act of 1847. |