In the decades either side of 1700, England witnessed a major public debate about the immortality of the soul. At its centre were two unlikely figures: the lawyer Henry Layton and the physician William Coward. Across numerous publications, both argued that the soul's immortality was a pagan invention absent from early scripture and only later absorbed into Christianity. Their detailed histories of the soul aimed to recast it as an inescapably human creation, rather than a natural and revea...