, and the streets and avenues of the cemetery are crowded
with carriages and thronged with pedestrians, the tramping of horses'
feet, the rumbling of wheels, and the voices of men fill the air, and
the place which was so silent and deserted this morning is now as noisy
and bustling as the metropolis yonder. And soon begin to arrive thick
and fast the funeral trains. Many of the black-plumed hearses are
followed by only a single hired coach or omnibus, others by long trails
of splendid equipages. Upon the broad slope of a hill, whither the
greater number of the processions move, entirely destitute of trees
and flooded with sunshine, many thousand graves, mostly unmarked by
headstones, lie close together, resembling in appearance a corn-field
which has been permitted to run to grass unploughed. Standing upon an
elevated point near the summit, and looking down those acres of hillocks
to where the busy laborers are engaged in putting bodies into the
ground, covering them with earth, and rounding the soil over them, one
is perhaps struck for the first time with the full force, meaning,
and beauty of the language of Paul in his first letter to the
Corinthians:--"That which thou sowest is not that body which shall be,
but bare grain. It [the human body] is sown in corruption, is sown in
dishonor, is sown in weakness. It is sown a natural body; it is raised
[or springs up, to complete the figure] a spiritual body. Flesh
and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven."--I once heard a
distinguished botanist dispute the accuracy of this simile, inasmuch, he
said, as the seed, when it is sown in the ground, does not _die_, but in
fact then first begins to _live_ and to display the vital force which
was previously asleep in it; while the human body decays and is resolved
into its primitive gaseous, mineral, and vegetable elements, the
particles of which, disseminated everywhere, and transferred through
chemical affinities into other and new organisms, lose all traces of
their former connection.--In answer to such a finical criticism as this,
intended to invalidate the authority of the great Apostolic Theologian,
I replied, that Paul was not an inspired _botanist_,--in fact, that
he probably knew nothing whatever about botany as a science,--but an
inspired religious teacher, who employed the language of his people and
the measure of knowledge to which his age had attained, to expound to
his contemporaries the principles of his Master'