It has become a tragic commonplace of our times that men in the West have abandoned the traditional hopes of the Christian faith and found nothing to replace them except an all-prevading anxiety. This is especially true of the promise of life ofter death. This book begins by examining the anxiety as it has been expressed by leading writers of the present day such as Gide, Camus and, at a popular level, Francoise Sagan and by philosophers such as Heidegger, Jaspers and, in the last century, Kierkegaard. The Marxist view is also discussed and analysed. The book continues with a survey of what men have believed about life after death from the ochre-smeared burials of Neanderthal Man through the developed religious systems of Ancient Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome to Islam and the great Oriental religions. An examination of the widely differing views of Protestant theologians is followed by a detailed account of specifically Christian beliefs about the kingdom of heaven, resurrection, general and particular judgements, hell, purgatory and limbo and the authority for these.