Those again who, because of a more realistic tendency, insisted upon the essentiality of our body, were logically driven to a gross materialism. If science had proved that the belief in a bodily resurrection is untenable, why should it not be able to demonstrate that all religious doctrines were delusions? This reasoning seemed to many so natural that many scientific facts contributed evidence in their favor even when these facts pointed entirely in the opposite direction. There was, however, no necessity to think and reason as these two main schools in our age have done. One might also from the beginning, have taken the same road and arrived at the same conclusion as, for instance, Granfelt in his “Christian Dogmatic.” “It has been demonstrated beyond doubt by natural science,” says this prominent theologian, “that the matter of a human body is, even here on earth, in continuous circulation, so that in the course of a few weeks all atoms of the whole body are replaced by new atoms. The only lasting attribute of the soul during this process is the spiritual body, which assimilates, typically forms, and again secretes the earthly matter. It must be this spiritual body, then, that constitutes the combining element between man’s earthly body and his glorified body in the eternal life.” Christianity speaks not only of a material resurrection on the day of judgment; it also says that man possesses within him a spiritual body, which after death immediately arises to everlasting life. This latter conception is not confined to Christianity. In all religions we find two tendencies side by side, the one idealistic and the other more realistic, which indeed are not really opposed to each other, inasmuch as the belief in a spiritual body may be said to constitute the basis even for the realistic conception that places the spirit in co-relation with the body in the grave. The idealistic tendency may be traced away back even to prehistoric times and has generally been connected with some other burial methods, among which cremation was the most common. The place cremation occupied in ancient thought and the connection fancied by our forefathers between the elements which make up man’s spiritual body, may be gathered from Victor Rydberg’s researches in Germanic mythology. “The popular ecclesiastical dualism of soul and body,” says Rydberg, “was as foreign to the Veda-Aryans as to the heathen Germanic race. According to the latter, man consisted of six different elements: First, the earthly element of which the visible body is made; second, a vegetative; third, an animal; fourth, the so-called _liten_ (_litr_), an inner body shaped after the gods, and invisible to earthly eyes; fifth, the soul; sixth, the spirit.”