Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 12.djvu/742

722 722 I N C I N D For the manufacture of the incense now used in the Christian churches of Europe there is no fixed rule. The books of ritual are agreed that Ex. xxx. 34 should be taken as a guide as much as possible. It is recommended that frankincense should enter as largely as possible into its composition, and that if inferior materials be employed at all they should not be allowed to preponderate. In Rome olibanum alone is employed ; in other places benzoin, storax, aloes, cascarilla bark, cinnamon, cloves, and musk are all said to be occasionally used. In the Russian Church, benzoin is chiefly employed. The Armenian liturgy, in its benediction of the incense, speaks of &quot; this perfume prepared from myrrh and cinnamon.&quot; The preparation of pastils of incense has probably come down in a continuous tradition from ancient Egypt, Babylonia, and Phoenicia. Cyprus was for cen turies famous for their manufacture, and they were still known in the middle ages by the names of pastils or osselets of Cyprus. Maimonides, in his More Nevochim, states that the use of incense in the worship of the Jews originated as a cor rective of the disagreeable odours arising from the si ;ughter and burning of the animals offered in sacrifice. There can be no doubt that its use throughout the East is based on sanitary considerations ; and in Europe even, in the time when the dead were buried in the churches, it was recog nized that the burning of incense served essentially to preserve their salubrity. But evidently the idea that the odour of a burnt-offering (cf. the KVUT^S fj&vs oxr^-t] of Odyss. xii. 369) is grateful to the deity, being indeed the most essential part of the sacrifice, or at least the vehicle by which alone it can successfully be conveyed to its destination, is also a very early one, if not abso lutely primitive ; and survivals of it are possibly to be met with even among the most highly cultured peoples where the purely symbolical nature of all religious ritual is most clearly understood and maintained. Some such idea plainly underlies the familiar phrase &quot; a sweet savour,&quot; more literally &quot; a savour of satisfaction,&quot; by which an acceptable offering by fire is so often denoted in the Bible (Gen. viii. 21, Lev ; i. 9, et passim; cf. Eph. v. 2). It is easy to imagine how, as men grew in sensuous appreciation of pleasant perfumes, and in empirical knowledge of the sources from which these could be derived, this advance would naturally express itself, not only in their domestic habits, but also in the details of their religious ceremonial, so that the custom of adding some kind of incense to their animal sacrifices, and at length that of offering it pure and simple, would inevitably arise. Ultimately, with the development of the spiritual discernment of men, the &quot; offering of incense &quot; became a mere symbolical expres sion for prayer (see Rev. v. 8, viii. 3, 4). Clement of Alexandria expresses this in his well-known words : &quot; The true altar of incense is the just soul, and the perfume from it is holy prayer.&quot; (So also Crigen,CW. Cels., viii. 17, 20.) The ancients were familiar with the sanitary efficacy of fumigations. The energy with which Ulysses, after the slaughter of the suitors, calls to Euryciea for &quot;fire and sulphur&quot; to purge (literally &quot; fumigate &quot;) the dining-hall from the pollution of their blood (Od. xxii. 481, 482) would startle those who imagine that sanitation is a peculiarly modern science. There is not the slightest doubt that the censing of things and persons was first practised for acts of purification, and thus became sym bolical of consecration, and finally of the sanctification of the soul. The Egyptians understood the use of incense as symbolical of the purification of the soul by prayer. Catholic writers generally treat it as typifying contrition, the preaching of the gospel, the prayers of the faithful, and the virtues of the saints. (G. B.) INCEST, carnal connexion between persons so related that marriage could not take place between them according to the Levitical rules. In England incest has not generally been treated as a crime, although, along with other offences against morals, it was made punishable by death in 1650. Since the Restoration it has, to use Blackstone s phrase, been left to the &quot; feeble coercion of the spiritual courts.&quot; Under the divorce law, incest is one of the aggravations of adultery which entitle a wife to divorce her husband. In the law of Scotland, it is a crime nominally punishable with death, but the penalty usually inflicted is penal servitude for life. This sentence was actually pronounced on a man in 1855, In the United States, as in England, incest is not an indictable offence at common law, but it has been made so by the legislation of some of the States. INCHBALD, MRS ELIZABETH (1753-1821), an English actress, dramatic author, and novelist, was born 15th October 1753. She was the daughter of a farmer at Standingfield, near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, her maiden name being Simpson. On account of the death of her father in her eighth year, she and her sisters never enjoyed the advantages of school training or of any regular supervision in their studies, but they nevertheless seem to have acquired at an early period refined and literary tastes. A favourite amusement of the family was readings, chiefly of a dramatic kind, and Elizabeth, notwithstanding that she was afflicted with an impedi ment of speech, which drove her into solitude, soon conceived a strong desire, not only to see the great world, but to become an actress. After making an attempt with little success to secure an engagement in a Norwich theatre, she in April 1772 left secretly for London, where she made the acquaintance of several managers and actors, but with no better fortune. In June she, however, married Mr Inchbald, a comedian in Drury Lane Theatre, and in September following she made her debut as an actress in the character of Cordelia, her husband taking the part of Lear. For several years she acted along with her husband in the provinces, but notwithstanding her great beauty and her good mental aptitude for acting, the impediment in her speech, by rendering rapidity and ease of utterance impossible, prevented her from attaining to more than very moderate excellence. After the death of her husband in 1778 she continued for some time on the stage, but her success as a dramatic author led her to retire in 1789. She died at Kensington, August 1, 1821. Mrs Inchbald s plays amount to nineteen in all. Some of them were for a time very successful, especially Wives as they were and Maids as they arc. Among the others may be mentioned Such Things Are ; The Married Man ; The Wedding Day ; The Mid night Hour ; Everyone has his Fault ; and Lovers J^otvs. She also edited a collection of the British Theatre, with biographical and critical remarks, 25 vols., 1806-1809 ; a Collection of Farces, 7 vols., 1809; and The Modern Theatre, 10 vols., 1809. Her fame, how ever, now rests chiefly on her two novels, A Simple Story, and Nature and Art. These works possess many minor faults and in accuracies, but on the whole their style is easy, natural, and grace ful ; and if they are tainted in some degree by a morbid and exaggerated sentiment, and display none of that faculty of creation possessed by the best writers of fiction, the pathetic situatioiis, and the deep and pure feeling pervading them, secured for them a wide but now a waning popularity. Some time before her death Mrs Inchbald destroyed an autobiography for which she had been offered 1000 by Phillips the publisher; hut her Memoirs, compiled by J. Boaden, chiefly from her private journal, appeared in 1833 in two volumes. An interesting account of Mrs Inchbald is contained in Records of a Girlhood, by Frances Ann Kemble, 1878. INCUBATION. See BIRDS, vol. iii. p. 775, and RE PRODUCTION. For ARTIFICIAL INCUBATION, see POULTRY. INDEPENDENTS, a religious denomination whose distinctive ecclesiastical principle is that the individual congregation or church is a society strictly voluntary and autonomous, standing directly under the authority of Jesus Christ, living in immediate dependence on Him, and