The custom of interring persons of rank in churches was first introduced into this country by Cuthbert, the tenth Archbishop of Canterbury, who in the year A.D. 798 procured the privilege from the Pope to have churchyards for interment: with reference to burying in churches, the custom did not arise earlier than the year 1076. In the reign of William the Conqueror, the council held at Winchester, under Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, by the ninth canon, opposed burial in churches; it soon after, however, became a custom, and vaults were built under the altars. “It is horrid,” said the Austrian emperor, “that a place of worship--a temple of the Supreme Being--should be converted into a pest-house for living creatures.” A person who upon his death-bed makes it a condition in his will that he should be buried in a church or chapel, acts like a madman; he ought to set his fellow-creatures a good example, and not do all in his power to destroy their health by exposing them to the effluvia arising from a corpse in a state of putrefaction. The following extract is from a sermon preached in 1552 by Bishop Latimer, which proves that even at that comparatively early period, when the population of London could scarcely have been one-fifth of what it is now, the nuisance of intramural interments was found to be dangerous to health. “The citizens of Naim,” observed the bishop, “hadd their buryinge-place withoute the citie, which no doubt is a laudable thinge; and I doe marvel that London, being soe great a citie, hath not a burial-place without; for no doubt it is an unwholesome thinge to bury within the citie, especiallie at such a time when there be great sicknesses and manie die together. I think, verilie, that many a man taketh his death in St. Paul’s churchyard, and this I speak of experience, for I myself, when I have been there some mornings to heare the sermons, have felt such an ill-savoured and unwholesome savour, that I was the worse for it a great while after; and I think no lesse but it is the occasion of great sicknesse and disease.” Well would it have been for the inhabitants of this vast metropolis had Sir Christopher Wren’s plan been carried out at the rebuilding of the city, after the fire of 1666. All churchyards were to have been removed without the town. In the year 1786, the legislature of Germany passed a law, which was punctually observed in the empire over which Joseph the Second ruled, and which we would do well to imitate, instead of using the under-part of our chapels as store and pest-houses. This law prohibited the burying of dead bodies in any chapel or church whatever; neither rank nor affluence can obtain permission to evade it, as in the enforcement of it no respect is paid to persons.