Not only did the British believe that their friends were in Elysium, but they likewise supposed themselves to be under the personal and immediate guardianship of the “gentry”. The Rev. S. Baring-Gould refers to the beautiful legends which centre around this belief as too often, alas, but apples of Sodom, fair cheeked, but containing the dust and ashes of heathenism. After lamenting the heresy—“too often current among the lower orders and dissenters”—that the souls of the departed become angels, he goes on to explain: “In Judaic and Christian doctrine the angel creation is distinct from that of human beings, and a Jew or a Catholic would as little dream of confusing the distinct conception of angel and soul as of believing in metempsychosis. But not so dissenting religion. According to Druidic dogma the souls of the dead were guardians of the living, a belief shared with the Ancient Indians, etc. Thus the hymn, ‘I want to be an Angel,’ so popular in dissenting schools, is founded on a venerable Aryan myth and therefore of exceeding interest, but Christian it is not.”[185]
Lucan, the Roman poet, alluding to the Druids observed—
If dying mortals doom they sing aright,
No ghosts descend to dwell in dreadful night
No parting souls to grisly Pluto go
Nor seek the dreary silent shades below,
But forth they fly immortal to their kind
And other bodies in new worlds they find.
Fig. 45.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).