not by the disfiguration of those whose very dust is precious and sacred!

The

Are we told that the condition of the dead is of no moment if there shall be a resurrection? My Lord, we know that when the figure of the Archangel shall loom on the distant sky, and the fiat shall be uttered, Arise, ye dead!-it shall fall with startling-with vivifying energy on the dull cold ear of death. changes of ages in the grave cannot abate its force, or prevent its accomplishment. The deep billows of ocean may have rolled over us; we may have been consumed in the devouring flame; our bones may have been rudely torn from the sepulchre where they were first deposited, or have crumbled into powder on the shore or desert where they fell-all shall thrill with life and be radiant with immortality. Still, oh! still, do we not, in the full consciousness of this inspiring and sublime vision, cling to the quiet nook where our fathers repose under the wide-spreading arms of the cedar, or the graceful branches of the willow? Look to the body of living death, which the adventurer drags from the burning plains of Hindostan-happy if life remain until his shattered frame can be laid where in boyhood he wandered happier still if spared once more to behold it! Behold that youth whose eye gleams with the unnatural fire of consumption; how earnestly does he watch the fading outline of his land!-conscious, too truly conscious, he never shall revisit it; but leave his body to mix with strangers' dust, in a strange country!

Who would, who could, condemn him if the thought sadly overcast his soul? Who would not condemn him, if, with his hopes of life, there was not a deep tinge of this melancholy foreboding?

It is not I, then, my Lord, that plead for the dead. Nature, far more heart-stirring, impressive, and universal, in her eloquence, pleads for the sacredness of man's remains-for the sanctity of the tomb. If, accordingly, you follow my references we shall find, that the state of the departed has been a matter of consideration with almost all nations that reached any degree of refinement.

I am reminded by the beautiful structure that admits to this harvest-field of death, and by its hieroglyphics so graphically describing this locality as "the abode of the mortal part of man"—of that people who combined a grandeur of conception with a power of execution almost unrivalled. The EGYPTIANS deeply respected the dead; and, ignorant—certainly without any well-defined ideas of the soul's imperishabilityattempted to immortalise the body. Hence their elaborate and expensive processes of embalming; and hence, too, in all probability, those Titanic structures, whose long and broad shadows have fallen on the generations of forty centuries.

The JEWS regarded the rites of sepulture as so important, that to be deprived of them was the greatest indignity. The hints in Scripture of their habits clearly shew that the usual places of burial were without the cities-in fields, on the mountain's side,

or the bosom of their gardens. Many of these were constructed with exquisite taste and magnificence; others with great simplicity-some furnishing by their sequestered position a retreat for the robber and assassin, others ministering by their gloomy seclusion and terrors to the morbid imagination of demoniacs.

To behold, however, the majesty of ancient entombment we must visit PETRA-the Edom of prediction-that city in whose contemplation the mind is perplexed whether most to admire the bold grandeur of its circlet of rocks—their lovely tints, or the structures that, chiselled on their brow, seem to rival in beauty, strength, and durability, the precipices from which they rise. Petra, the necropolis of a nation, for a thousand years unknown even as to its locality, when discovered, presented on every side tombs of most elaborate workmanship-of inimitable splendor. It was "a city filled with tombs"-the narrow ravine through which you approach it being crowded with monuments along its dark, precipitous sides. When you emerge from that, and the full view bursts upon the eye, temples and tombs appear everywhere around-the theatre itself being surrounded with death and its mansions," all presenting the evidence of a people opulent, refined, luxurious, familiarising the mind with death, and thus endeavouring to strip it of its terrors by the gorgeousness of its abode.

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If we turn from the Oriental nations, and contemplate the more modern and not less polished GREEks,

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we shall find their practice consonant to the dictates of natural feeling and the suggestions of social interest. They exhausted," says Judge Story," the resources of their exquisite art in adorning the habitions of the dead. They discouraged interments within the limits of their cities; and consigned their reliques to shady groves, in the neighbourhood of murmuring streams and mossy fountains, close by the favorite resorts of those who were engaged in the study of philosophy and nature, and called them, with the elegant expressiveness of their own beautiful language, cemeteries, or places of sleep. The Romans, faithful to the example of Greece, erected the monuments to the dead in the suburbs of the Eternal city, (as they proudly denominated it,) on the sides of their spacious roads, in the midst of trees, and ornamental walks, and ever-varying flowers."

Who has not heard, my Lord, of the Père la Chaise of the French, with its countless monuments-fantastic in many cases, as among such a people some might be expected to be-rich and elegant in others as the proverbial taste of the French mind should lead us to anticipate-but all placed on an elevation calm, commanding, and inviting to reflection by its contiguity to life and gaiety! Who has not heard of Mount Auburn of the AMERICANS — perhaps the most attractive of all modern cemeteries-lovely in its position, abounding in natural beauties—and losing none of its charms by grotesqueness of artificial de

coration? Or, finally, who has not heard of the resting-places of the TURKISH dead—their romantic seclusion—their perfect repose-their almost religious calmness-in which, under the deep shade of the cypress grove, the soul is unconsciously led to thought?

In these historical references are seen the combined, the unanimous, sentiments of the most ancient, most refined, most luxurious, and gayest of nations and what produced this concurrence but the fact, that they all allowed nature to speak? and, obedient to her promptings, at once secured public health by burying without the city, and invited to meditation by the united charms of nature and art?

The propriety of this arrangement is obvious. There is the consideration of public health and safety -a consideration so momentous and urgent that one is astonished at its long neglect. On this point the most painful facts have been stated-strongly, incontrovertibly stated. Every one is conscious of the oppressiveness, the languor of a dying chamber; much more of the sickly exhalations that even force us from the corpse over which we hang in affection. What, then, must be the effect of a multitude of putrescent dead bodies-crowded in a narrow spacehuddled under an edifice for public worship, where no breath of heaven blows to carry away the mephitic, the pestilential vapour? This is not the picture of self-interest. I have no pecuniary concern in this or any other cemetery; but I have the interest of a