does them no injury._[56]
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,"[57] 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;"[58] 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 death-blow 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 from 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."[59]
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."[60] 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[61] 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."[62] 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!