And since the ashes of sacrifices
burnt upon the altar of God were carefully carried out
by the priests, and deposed in a clean field; since they
acknowledged their bodies to be the lodging of Christ,
and temples of the Holy Ghost, they devolved not all
upon the sufficiency of soul-existence; and therefore
with long services and full solemnities, concluded their
last exequies, wherein to all distinctions the Greek
devotion seems most pathetically ceremonious.
Christian invention hath chiefly driven at rites, which
speak hopes of another life, and hints of a resurrection.
And if the ancient Gentiles held not the immortality of
their better part, and some subsistence after death, in
several rites, customs, actions, and expressions, they
contradicted their own opinions: wherein Democritus
went high, even to the thought of a resurrection, as
scoffingly recorded by Pliny.* What can be more
express than the expression of Phocylides?+ Or who
would expect from Lucretius# a sentence of Ecclesiastes?
Before Plato could speak, the soul had wings in Homer,
which fell not, but flew out of the body into the man-
sions of the dead; who also observed that handsome
distinction of Demas and Soma, for the body conjoined
to the soul, and body separated from it.
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