“The disposal of the dead is always a question of difficulty. If the dead are buried, so great at last is the accumulation of bodies that the whole country round a great city becomes gradually a vast cemetery. After death, the buried body returns to its elements. If, instead of being buried, the body is burned, the same process occurs more rapidly. A community must always dispose of its dead, either by burial in land or water, or by burning, or chemical destruction equivalent to burning, or by embalming or preserving. The eventual dispersion of our frame is the same in all cases. Neither affection nor religion can be outraged by any manner of disposal of the dead which is done with proper solemnity and respect to the earthly dwelling-places of our friends. The question should be entirely placed on sanitary grounds. Burying in the ground appears certainly to be the most insanitary plan.” Parkes died before we had learned how perfectly and cheaply, how rapidly and inoffensively cremation could be carried on; and he favored burying in the sea rather than in the earth, whenever the distance was not too great for transport. He knew well how impossible it is to prevent graveyards within towns, or suburban cemeteries, from becoming sooner or later a source of danger or nuisance to the living, how difficult it is to find a suitable site and soil, sufficient space, and to secure proper regulations and management. These difficulties may not be so great amid your unlimited space as with us; but they must be an increasing evil in and around your large cities. I trust, therefore, that your work may assist in the more rapid progress of cremation as a substitute for burial. With us the legal objection has ceased. It is now acknowledged by the government, and has been decided by three judges that if cremation is so performed as to create no nuisance, and incite to no breach of the peace, it is not illegal. The religious objection has been answered by the _Bishop of Manchester_, by _Canon Liddon_, and by the _Earl of Shaftesbury_. The bishop said: “No intelligent faith can suppose that any Christian doctrine is affected by the manner in which this mortal body of ours crumbles into dust and sees corruption.” _Canon Liddon_ said, in a sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral:— “The resurrection of a body from its ashes is not a greater miracle than the resurrection of an unburnt body; each must be purely miraculous.” _Lord Shaftesbury_ said to me that any doubt as to the resurrection of a body because it had been burnt was an “audacious limitation of the Almighty”; and he asked, “What, then, has become of the blessed martyrs who were burned at the stake in ancient and modern persecution?”