In his “Enigmas of Life” William Rathbone Greg concedes that “visible and ascertainable phenomena give no countenance to the theory of a future or spiritual life.” He urges that a sense of identity, a conscious continuity of the Ego, is an essential element of the doctrine, and Mr. Greg speaks of this as accounting for “the astonishing doctrine of the resurrection of the body which has so strangely and thoughtlessly found its way into the popular creed. The primitive parents or congealers of that creed—whoever they may have been—innocent of all science, and oddly muddled in their metaphysics, but resolute in their conviction that the same persons who died here should be, in very deed, the same who should rise hereafter—systematised their anticipations into the notion that the grave should give up its actual inmates for their ordained transformation and their allotted fate. The current notion of the approaching end of the world, no doubt helped to blind them to the vulnerability, and indeed the fatal self-contradictions, of the form in which they had embodied their faith. Of course, if they had taken time to think, or if the Fathers of the Church had been more given to thinking in the rigid meaning of the word, they would have discovered that this special form rendered that faith absurd, indefensible, and virtually impossible. They did not know, or they never considered, that the buried body soon dissolves into its elements, which, in the course of generations and centuries, pass into other combinations, form part of other living creatures, feed and constitute countless organisations one after another; so that when the graves are summoned ‘to give up the dead that are in them,’ and the sea ‘the dead that are in it,’ they will be called on to surrender what they no longer possess, and what no supernatural power can give back to them. It never occurred to those creed makers, who thus took upon themselves to carnalise an idea into a fact, that for every atom that once went to make up the body they committed to the earth, there would be scores of claimants before the Great Day of Account; and that even Omnipotence could scarcely be expected to make the same component part be in two or ten places at once. The original human frames, therefore, _could not be had when_, as supposed, they would be wanted.” And in his “Creed of Christendom” he writes: “Appearances all testify to the reality and permanence of death; a fearful onus of proof lies upon those who contend that these appearances are deceptive. When we interrogate the vast universe of organisation, we see not simply life and death, but gradually growing life and gradually approaching death. After death, all that we have ever _known_ of man is gone; all we have ever seen of him is dissolved into its component elements; it does not _disappear_ so as to leave us at liberty to imagine that it may have gone to exist elsewhere, but is actually used up as materials for other purposes.”