Religion, however, has one element within it still older, more fundamental, and more persistent than any mere belief in a god or gods--nay, even than the custom or practice of supplicating and appeasing ghosts or gods by gifts and observances. That element is the conception of the Life of the Dead. On the primitive belief in such life, all religion ultimately bases itself. The belief is in fact the earliest thing to appear in religion, for there are savage tribes who have nothing worth calling gods, but have still a religion or cult of their dead relatives. It is also the latest thing to survive in religion; for many modern spiritualists, who have ceased to be theists, or to accept any other form of the supernatural, nevertheless go on believing in the continued existence of the dead, and in the possibility of intercommunication between them and the living. This, therefore, which is the earliest manifestation of religious thought, {043}and which persists throughout as one of its most salient and irrepressible features, must engage our attention for a little time before we pass on to the genesis of polytheism. But the belief in continued life itself, like all other human ideas, has naturally undergone various stages of evolution. The stages glide imperceptibly into one another, of course; but I think we can on the whole distinguish with tolerable accuracy between three main layers or strata of opinion with regard to the continued existence of the dead. In the first or lowest stratum, the difference between life and death themselves is but ill or inadequately perceived; the dead are thought of as yet bodily living. In the second stratum, death is recognised as a physical fact, but is regarded as only temporary; at this stage, men look forward to the Resurrection of the Body, and expect the Life of the World to Come. In the third stratum, the soul is regarded as a distinct entity from the body; it survives it in a separate and somewhat shadowy form: so that the opinion as to the future proper to this stage is not a belief in the Resurrection of the Body, but a belief in the Immortality of the Soul. These two concepts have often been confounded together by loose and semi-philosophical Christian thinkers; but in their essence they are wholly distinct and irreconcilable. I shall examine each of these three strata separately.