Now {063}when people take to burning their dead, it is clear they will no longer be able to believe in the Resurrection of the Body. Indeed, if I am right in the theory here set forth, it is just in order to prevent the Resurrection of the Body at inconvenient moments that they take to burning. To be sure, civilised nations, with their developed power of believing in miracles, are capable of supposing, not only that the sea will yield up its dead, but also that burnt, mangled, or dispersed bodies will be collected from all parts to be put together again at the Resurrection. This, however, is not the naïve belief of simple and natural men. To them, when you have burnt a body you have utterly destroyed it, here and hereafter; and we know that mutilation and burning were employed for this very purpose in the case of vampires and other corpses whose total suppression was desirable. Sepoys were blown from the guns in the Indian mutiny for the express reason that, according to the Hindu belief, that method of disposing of them destroyed not only the body but the soul as well--got rid of them entirely. The ordinary human idea is that when you burn a body you simply annihilate it; and on that very account early Christians preferred burial to cremation, because they thought they stood thereby a better chance at the Resurrection. It is true they allowed that the divine omnipotence could make new bodies for the martyrs who were burnt; but for themselves, they seem to have preferred on the average to go on afresh with their old familiar ones. Naturally, therefore, among cremating peoples, the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body tended to go out, and what replaced it was the doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul. You may burn the body, but the spirit still survives; and the survival gives origin to a new philosophy of ghosts and _revenants_, a new idea of the inner nature of ghosthood. Gradually the spirit gets to be conceived as diviner essence, entangled and imprisoned, as it were, in the meshes of the flesh, and only to be set free by means {064}of fire, which thus becomes envisaged at last as friendly rather than destructive in its action on the dead body. What was at first a precaution against the return of the corpse becomes in the end a pious duty; just as burial itself, originally a selfish precaution against the pranks and tricks of returning corpses, becomes in the end so sacred and imperative that unburied ghosts are conceived as wandering about, Archytas-wise, begging for the favour of a handful of sand to prevent them from homeless vagabondage for ever. Nations who burn come to regard the act of burning as the appointed means for freeing the ghost from the confining meshes of the body, and regard it rather as a solemn duty to the dead than as a personal precaution.