This they conceive to
be best done by depriving the dead body of all ornaments and outward
honours. For, stripped in this manner, they conceive it to approach the
nearest to its native worthlessness or dust. Such funerals, therefore,
may excite in the spectator a deep sense of the low and debased
condition of man. And his feelings will be pure on the occasion, because
they will be unmixed with the consideration of the artificial
distinctions of human life. The spectator too will be more likely, if he
sees all go undistinguished to the grave, to deduce for himself the
moral lesson, that there is no true elevation of one above another, only
as men follow the practical duties of virtue and religion. But what
serious reflections, or what lessons of morality, on the other hand, do
the funerals of the world produce, if accompanied with pomp and
splendour? To those who have sober and serious minds, they produce a
kind of pity, that is mingled with disgust. In those of a ludicrous
turn, they provoke ludicrous ideas, when they see a dead body attended
with such extravagant parade. To the vulgar and the ignorant no one
useful lesson is given. Their senses are all absorbed in the show; and
the thoughts of the worthlessness of man, as well as of death and the
grave, which ought naturally to suggest themselves on such occasions,
are swallowed up in the grandeur and pageantry of the procession.
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