EV. I do not approve his latitude of thought, yet it were severe to think this, even of Priestley, merely because he disbelieved _separate_ spiritual existence; for Aristotle also asserts, that “the soul could not exist _without the body_, and yet that it was not the body, but a part of it.” Zeno, and the Stoics, termed that which was called a spirit _material_; and not only Ray and Derham, but even Paley, and Johnson, disbelieved the separate existence. The archdeacon’s opinion, that we should have a _substantial_ resurrection, is founded on New-Testament evidence, and expressed in his discourse on a future state. The apostle’s simile of the wheat implies a _death_ of the grain: it dies, but there is no _remodelling_, for it is the _germ_ that lives and grows; so, although the body may not be restored, there is a development of _its_ germ in the transit or resurrection of _its_ spirit. The sage thought also the simile of St. Paul should be taken _literally_, and not _figuratively_: and yet he qualifies it thus: “We see that it is not to be the same body, for the Scripture uses the illustration of grain sown (which in its exact sense implies an offspring, and not a resurrection), and we know that the grain which grows is not the same with what is sown. You cannot suppose that we shall rise with a diseased body; it is enough if there be such a sameness as to distinguish identity of person.” Blumenbach believed that when the soul revived, after death, the brain would equally revive; and there is, indeed, nothing very irrational in all this, for death is, even to our senses, not an annihilation, but only a new combination of matter. The Greek sceptics thought that the teeth would remain perfect, if all else was decomposed and lost; and the rabbins conferred this perpetuity on _one_ bone of the _spinal column_, which they called LUZ. These strange notions of the mystic union may explain to us that diversity of custom, in various nations, as to the disposal of the dead. While the Irish papists, with a superstitious reverence for inanimate clay, celebrate their wakes with rites often as licentious as they are profane; the cannibal _Calatiæ_ thought it more respectful to _eat_ the bodies of _their_ departed friends, at least so writes Herodotus; and the filial love of other Indian tribes invites the children to strangle their aged parents, as they sit in their fresh-made graves. It is certainly more consolatory to associate our thoughts with the _immortal_ part of a lost friend; to believe the _spirit_ to be in celestial keeping, and that it still hovers around us. The collapse and change of features prove that the _body_ is then but as the dust from which it was first formed. I would not wish, like Socrates, to have my limbs scattered over the earth, because “Cœlo tegitur qui non habet urnam;”