Thomas Hardy was a Victorian novelist and is famous for his books like Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. In the time when he lived, many people were rejecting the Christian views they had been raised with. He rejected it himself.

Instead of believing that human beings could live on in an afterlife, his work emphasized the connections that human generations have with each other. Here is a Thomas Hardy poem that expresses this.

I am the family face;

Flesh perishes, I live on,

Projecting trait and trace

Through time to times anon,

And leaping from place to place

over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can

In curve and in voice and eye

Despise the human span

Of durance – that is I;

The eternal thing in man,

That heeds no call to die.