Lactantius, Divine Institutes 7.11

When the times that God has fixed for death reach their completion, death itself will come to an end. Since temporal death follows temporal life, it follows necessarily that souls will rise again to everlasting life, because temporal death has received its limit. Just as the life of the soul is eternal — in it the soul takes the divine and inexpressible fruits of its own immortality — so too its death must be perpetual, a state in which it pays perpetual punishments and infinite torments for its sins. The situation therefore stands thus: those who are blessed in this bodily and earthly life will always be miserable hereafter, because they have already obtained the good things they preferred; this is the lot of those who worship gods but neglect God. But those who pursued justice in this life and were miserable, despised, and needy, often vexed by insults and injuries on account of justice itself — for virtue cannot be held in any other way — will always be blessed hereafter, so that, having already borne evils, they may also enjoy good things. This certainly befalls those who, despising earthly and fragile goods, follow the heavenly religion of God, whose goods are eternal, just like the One who bestows them. Do not the works of body and soul show that the soul is exempt from death? Because the body is itself fragile and mortal, whatever works it undertakes are equally transitory. Tullius says there is nothing worked by human hands that is not sometime reduced to ruin, either by human violence or by the sheer aging of all things. Yet we see that the works of the soul are eternal. Whoever, despising present things, have left monuments of their genius and great deeds for posterity have clearly sought an indelible name for their mind and virtue. If bodily works are mortal because the body itself is mortal, it follows that the soul proves to be immortal, because we see that its works are not mortal. In the same way, the desires of body and soul declare the one to be mortal, the other everlasting. The body desires nothing but temporal things — food, drink, clothing, rest, pleasure — and yet it cannot even desire or attain these without the soul’s assent and aid. The soul, by itself, desires many things that do not pertain to the body’s duty or fruit, and these are not fragile but eternal: the fame of virtue, the memory of a name. The soul even desires the worship of God, which consists in abstaining from desires and lusts, enduring pain, and despising death — all against the body’s inclinations. From this it is credible that the soul does not perish but is separated from the body, because the body can do nothing without the soul, while the soul can do many and great things without the body. Consider also this: things visible to the eyes and tangible to the hand, because they can suffer external force, cannot be eternal; but things that come under neither touch nor sight, whose only power, reason, and effect appear, are eternal, because they suffer no external force. If the body is mortal because it is subject to sight and touch, then the soul is immortal because it can be neither touched nor seen.