Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

338 FUNERAL POMP
and women, intent only on the Church suffering,
should thus have opened the ranks of the priesthood
to some who thought more of their own maintenance
than of the Church militant. Unless a chantry
priest were a holy man or a studious one, it is obvious
that he was open to many temptations. In
the same way funerals were liable to be made
opportunities for vain display. St. Augustine says
that all accessories help departed souls only very indirectly
by moving those who witness them to pity.
The body of a great personage was not uncommonly
kept unburied for a month, during all which time
prayers were unceasingly offered up for the soul.
There was a reaction against funeral pomp even
before Blessed Thomas More's quaint Supplication of
Souls. A request to "bury me within three days "
is sometimes found in the records of the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries.1 Occasionally a stronger
term is used. Sir Lewis Clifford, dying in 1404,
orders that his " wretched carrion may be buried in
the furthest corner of the churchyard," and that " no
stone " be laid, " nor other thing whereby any man
may know where my stinking carrion lieth ".'2
The next world was a reality so awful to our
forefathers that, as with all those whose spirit of
faith is strong, their minds constantly dwelt on
Testamenta and Testamenta Eborace-nsia, passim.
- Vetnsta Testamenta, i. 164. He was an ancestor of Lord
Clifford of Chudleigh. He had been seduced by the Lollards, but
afterwards repented.