CHAPTER VI.
THE BENEFIT OF DISSOLUTION.
Thus far the investigation of customs and beliefs in ancient
and modern times relating to the treatment of the dead has
established the fact that the dissolution of the body was a
thing eagerly to be desired in the interests of the dead. With
complete disintegration the summum bonum of the dead, so far as
it was in the power of their surviving friends to win it for them,
was secured. It remains to consider in what way the dead profited
thereby.
Now I have hitherto spoken designedly of dissolution as a benefit, not to the souls of the dead nor to their bodies, but simply 'to the dead' without further specification. It will now limit the range of discussion as to the nature of the summum bonum to which dissolution gave access, if we can first answer the old question, cui bono? Is it the body alone or the soul alone or both conjointly on which the benefit is conferred? This question once answered, we shall have eliminated a certain number of possible conceptions of future happiness.
That the body alone might have been the recipient of the whole benefit is an idea which no one will entertain. Was it then the soul alone to which the dissolution of the body brought gain? Death, as we have learnt, was not a complete and final severance of soul from body; the soul might re-enter and re-animate the corpse. Was dissolution then believed to complete the severance?
The deliverance of the soul from the bondage of the body, the divorce of spirit from matter, is an idea which has appealed and does appeal to many, and would therefore furnish a motive of considerable intrinsic probability for the treatment which the Greek
