In diverse ways, deaths in Scotland have differed from those in other parts of the British Isles, though, as this volume shows, this difference has diminished greatly. In art, as chapters by Cumming, Macdonald and Sabatos show, national and international influences – from the arts and crafts in Phoebe Anna Traquair's ecclesiastical decoration, though the secular spirituality of Douglas Strachan's post-1918 apocalypse war-memorial windows, to Victorian remembrance of the 1692 Glencoe massacre – seeped into native Presbyterian traditions. In literature, the distinctively Scottish was being over-ridden by imperial heroism and international intrigue, nowhere more so than in Owen Dudley Edwards's tour of the many deaths in John Buchan. But even deaths in Ronald Jack's study of J. M. Barrie's ‘strictly Calvinist world’ (p. 96) of Thrums were being recalled as part of a lost world to most of the readers, a romantic folk memory as much as the Jacobite deaths spotlighted in Alastair Fowler's study of Robert Louis Stevenson. Even the architecture of death shows Scottish kirks and crematoria swept up in wider influences, as in the first crematorium in Glasgow which, as Hilary Grainger notes, was designed to draw upon Norman or early English influences, whilst garden cemetery and burial landscapes, in two revealing chapters by Dingwall and Buckam respectively, changed from the cluttered, overgrown inner-city kirkyards to the lawn landscape widespread in the garden-of-remembrance mode. Where the Scottish way of death lingered for longer was in the climbing death rates which, from the late nineteenth century, overtook England in most categories, the topic of a scintillating tour of the hard data of death by Reid et al. A second field of distinctiveness was law, where Stephen White uses the bizarre 1944 case of coffin-wood theft by the crematorium manager in Aberdeen to open a cross-border comparison of body-theft law. Nowhere is the death of the Scottish way of death so sharp as in the decline of the Reformed theology on the afterlife. The Calvinist hell, ably tackled by Stewart J. Brown, was dead, for the Lowland kirk at least, by the 1910s, yet it remained unclear if praying for the dead was a sin. Doctrinal confusion – not for first time – governed the Kirk as it moved from confronting Arminianism in the nineteenth century to the war-fostered spirituality and then the common decency demanded by worshippers in two successive world wars of the twentieth. Following Brown's stellar treatment of Calvinist death, Peter Howson demonstrates the impact of change upon Great War Presbyterian chaplains, and Glenys Carswell notes that even the unremitting rectitude of the ‘wee wee frees’ in the Free Presbyterian Church funeral was partly overpowered by popular demand for pop music and life celebration. In death as in life, the secularisation of Scotland is, even by 1955, traced in this volume.