As full of sunshine to our aged eyes

As when it nursed the blossoms of our spring.
Such is true love, which steals into the heart
With feet as silent as the lightsome dawn
That kisses smooth the rough brows of the dark,
And hath its will through blissful gentleness.

For an anthem appropriate to our conception of marriage as the sacrament of renewing life, the following magnificent lines from Swinburne could not be excelled :

With us the winds and fountains
And lightnings live in tune;
And morning-coloured mountains
That burn into the noon,

The mist's mild veil on valleys muffled from the moon :

The thunder-darkened highlands,

And lowlands hot with fruit,
Sea-bays and shoals and islands,

And cliffs that foil man's foot,

And all the flower of large-limbed life and all the root:

With us the fields and rivers,
The grass that summer thrills,
The haze where morning quivers,
The peace at heart of hills,

The sense that kindles nature, and the soul that fills;

The strife of things and beauty,
The fire and light adored,
Truth, and life-lightening duty,

Love without crown or sword,

That by his might and godhead makes man god and lord.

It would be wise for the ceremony to close with a re-assertion of the sacramental nature of marriage and the social necessity of the form to which the bride and bridegroom have submitted.

The service accordingly might finish with sentences to this effect:-"In the lives of

and

this hour will always shine supreme; it will shed a softening radiance over misfortune and add splendour to every triumph; not only because its vow possesses virtue in itself, but also because it will remain to them for ever the symbol and prototype of each new day's new plighting of love's troth."

CHAPTER XV

THE BURIAL SERVICE

THE opening rubric of the Order for the Burial of the Dead reads thus: "Here is to be noted, that the Office ensuing is not to be used for any that die unbaptised, or excommunicate, or have laid violent hands upon themselves." No one, judging from the point of view of common humanity and educational utility, can waver in the desire that the Book of Common Prayer should be revised at least to the extent of deleting this regulation. Three classes of persons are denied the privilege of receiving from the community the last marks of respect and homage, human tenderness and pity. Yet these are the very classes which the spirit of Christianity has most yearned to save, and for which, according to Christian doctrine, an infinite sacrifice was gladly made. It well may be that a separate form of burial rite, or at least one with special features of its own, should be used for each of these classes of persons, but there is no reason why they should be wholly excluded from the pale of our national humanity.

The cruelty which animated the formulation and authorisation of this rubric is so opposed to our newer humanism, that it tends to awaken in us a feeling against its authors similar to that which they undoubtedly felt

towards all human beings who died unbaptised, excommunicate, or by laying violent hands upon themselves. In the spirit of modern humanism, however, we must restrain our revulsion by recalling to mind the historic fact that the cruelty of this rubric was no peculiar and special outburst of conscious inhumanity, but was generally characteristic of an earlier stage of social and moral evolution. It was part of that same blindness and hardness which manifested itself in many customs now made obsolete by the new spirit. It was one in its psychic origin with the whole penal code of England. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, more than two hundred different offences were punished, at least nominally, by the death-penalty. Only through the indefatigable enthusiasm and efforts of Jeremy Bentham and his disciple Sir Samuel Romilly was this stain wiped off from English life. But the removal of the same kind of blot from the organised religion of England, as seen in the opening rubric of the Burial Service, still awaits its Bentham and Romilly.

If there be any human beings whom the Church ought to bury with infinite tenderness and the humility of conscious shame, it is those who have laid violent hands on themselves. For had the Church done her work aright, had she fulfilled her mission, none would have been driven to the despair of self-destruction. Not even a discrimination between the sane and the insane, nor the legal fiction that almost all suicides are insane, can wash the guilt of their sin from the hands of the Church. For, had she done her work aright, the circumstances and exigencies of life would not drive men mad. No, nor would unfortunate creatures be born predestined by heredity to madness. The Church herself is culpable. Had she done her work aright during the last two

thousand years, her love and service would by now have made the life of every mortal precious to himself and the strength of every mortal equal to the task of self-direction.

The Church has erred egregiously in interpreting her duty to those driven to self-destruction. Her especial concern should have been to render homage to the humanity which had lain hidden in those who did not find life worth the living or themselves equal to life's strain. Instead, perhaps because blinded to her own guilt, she refused to bury the suicide, and still refuses to do so. This whole rubric, however, will be discarded by the same spirit which, more than half a century ago, abolished the law and the practice of burying suicides at cross-roads with a stake driven through the body.

The Prayer Book should, as I have said, furnish a special rite for the reverent burying of those who have been bewildered by life's contradictions. And the

essential burden of such a rite should be that these unfortunates have been more sinned against than sinning, and that, except for her unfaithfulness to her mission, the Church would long since have filled the world with the love that banishes despair and the self-control that preserves sanity.

As to the excommunicated, the thought that the Church should exercise her ghostly powers to terrorise heretics into outward conformity provokes in us a smile of pitying contempt; for we are apt to think that excommunication is a practice long since obsolete, and that if attempted to-day it could excite no constraining dread. But in the refusal of a State Church to bury an excommunicated member there still exists a terrible penalty to all who, like myself for instance, regard the Church as the nation organised in its ideal judgments and aspirations. When the Church refuses to bury its dead, the nation, as an