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Every eschatology, Brandon concludes, is an effort by man to provide himself with "spiritual security" against the passage of time. Unlike the lower animals, which live only in the present moment, man is conscious of time, and thus of death. Stoicism and Epicureanism—faiths for the Greco-Roman intellectual elite—accepted death as the final end to life with equanimity. But man generally has rebelled against this kind of blunt pragmatism, instinctively seeking "some state in which he will be secure from the everlasting menace of time's destructive logic." Brandon tacitly admits that he has some trouble juggling his Christian faith and his academic findings. "My findings as a professor lead me to recognize certain things," he says, "and if these clash with my views as an Anglican then I must not panic but evaluate them properly, balancing one side against the other. I believe we have inherited a form of Christianity which one may well question as to whether it was original, and whether it has developed on the right lines."