honours. For, stripped in this manner, they conceive it to approach the
nearest to its native worthlessness or dust. Such funerals, therefore,
may excite in the spectator a deep sense of the low and debased
condition of man. And his feelings will be pure on the occasion, because
they will be unmixed with the consideration of the artificial
distinctions of human life. The spectator too will be more likely, if he
sees all go undistinguished to the grave, to deduce for himself the
moral lesson, that there is no true elevation of one above another, only
as men follow the practical duties of virtue and religion. But what
serious reflections, or what lessons of morality, on the other hand, do
the funerals of the world produce, if accompanied with pomp and
splendour? To those who have sober and serious minds, they produce a
kind of pity, that is mingled with disgust. In those of a ludicrous
turn, they provoke ludicrous ideas, when they see a dead body attended
with such extravagant parade. To the vulgar and the ignorant no one
useful lesson is given. Their senses are all absorbed in the show; and
the thoughts of the worthlessness of man, as well as of death and the
grave, which ought naturally to suggest themselves on such occasions,
are swallowed up in the grandeur and pageantry of the procession.
Funerals, therefore, of this kind, are calculated to throw honour upon
riches, abstractedly of moral merit; to make the creature of as much
importance when dead as when alive; to lessen the humility of man; and
to destroy, of course, the moral and religious feelings that should
arise upon such occasions. Add to which, that such a conduct among
christians must be peculiarly improper; for the christian dispensation
teaches man, that he is "to work out his salvation with fear and
trembling." It seems inconsistent, therefore, to accompany with all the
outward signs of honour and greatness the body of a poor wretch, who has
had this difficult and awful task to perform, and who is on his last
earthly journey, previously to his appearance before the tribunal of the