The preponderance of opinion, however, is decidedly in favour of a literal and exact understanding of the event, that it was, in effect, Samuel who appeared to the guilty monarch and foretold his end. Origen argues upon these lines, basing his reasons upon the plain statements of Holy Writ: “But it is distinctly stated that Saul knew it was Samuel.”[17] And later he adds: “The Scripture cannot lie. And the words of Scripture are: And the woman saw Samuel.”[18] Elsewhere when treating of evil spirits he precisely states: “And that souls have their abiding place I have made known to you from the evocation by the witch of Samuel, when Saul requested her to divine.”[19] S. Ambrose also says: “Even after his death Samuel, as Holy Scripture informs us, prophesied of what was to come.”[20] We have further the overwhelming witness of S. Augustine, who in more than one place discusses the question at some length, and decides that the phantom evoked by the sibyl was really and truly the soul of the prophet Samuel. Thus in that important treatise _De Doctrina Christiana_, commenced in 397 and finally revised for issue in 427, he has: “The shade of Samuel, long since dead, truly foretold what was to come unto King Saul.”[21] Whilst a passage in the even more famous and weighty _De Cura pro mortuis gerenda_, written in 421, asserts: “For the prophet Samuel, who was dead, revealed the future to King Saul, who was yet alive.”[22] Josephus believed the apparition to have been summoned by the witch’s necromantic powers, for in his _Jewish Antiquities_, VI, xiv, 2, when dealing with the story of Endor, he chronicles: “[Saul] bade her bring up to him the soul of Samuel. She, not knowing who Samuel was, called him out of Hades,”[23] a remarkable testimony.