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Further still, we are reminded that in such a carnage as then
occurred, the bodies could not even be buried. But godly confidence
is not appalled by so ill-omened a circumstance; for the faithful bear
in mind that assurance has been given that not a hair of their head
shall perish, and that, therefore, though they even be devoured by
beasts, their blessed resurrection will not hereby be hindered. The
Truth would nowise have said, "Fear not them which kill the body,
but are not able to kill the soul," if anything whatever that an enemy
could do to the body of the slain could be detrimental to the future
life. Or will some one perhaps take so absurd a position as to contend
that those who kill the body are not to be feared before death, and
lest they kill the body, but after death, lest they deprive it of
burial? If this be so, then that is false which Christ says, "Be
not afraid of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that
they can do;" for it seems they can do great injury to the dead body.
Far be it from us to suppose that the Truth can be thus false. They
who kill the body are said "to do something," because the deathblow
is felt, the body still having sensation; but after that, they have
no more that they can do, for in the slain body there is no sensation.
And so there are indeed many bodies of Christians lying unburied; but
no one has separated them from heaven, nor froth that earth which is
all filled with the presence of Him who knows whence He will raise
again what He created. It is said, indeed, in the Psalm: "The
dead bodies of Thy servants have they given to be meat unto the fowls
of the heaven, the flesh of Thy saints unto the beasts of the earth.
Their blood have they shed like water round about Jerusalem; and
there was none to bury them." But this was said rather to exhibit the
cruelty of those who did these things, than the misery of those who
suffered them. To the eyes of men this appears a harsh and doleful
lot, yet "precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of His
saints." Wherefore all these last offices and ceremonies that concern
the dead, the careful funeral arrangements, and the equipment of the
tomb, and the pomp of obsequies, are rather the solace of the living
than the comfort of the dead. If a costly burial does any good to a
wicked man, a squalid burial, or none at all, may harm the godly.
His crowd of domestics furnished the purple-clad Dives with a funeral
gorgeous in the eye of man; but in the sight of God that was a more
sumptuous funeral which the ulcerous pauper received at the hands of the
angels, who did not carry him out to a marble tomb, but bore him aloft
to Abraham's bosom.
The men against whom I have undertaken to defend the city of God
laugh at all this. But even their own philosophers have despised a
careful burial; and often whole armies have fought and fallen for their
earthly country without caring to inquire whether they would be left
exposed on the field of battle, or become the food of wild beasts. Of
this noble disregard of sepulture poetry has well said: "He who has
no tomb has the sky for his vault." How much less ought they to
insult over the unburied bodies of Christians, to whom it has been
promised that the flesh itself shall be restored, and the body formed
anew, all the members of it being gathered not only from the earth,
but from the most secret recesses of any other of the elements in which
the dead bodies of men have lain hid!
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