be the "astral shell." The belief that the bai could assume any shape it pleased coincides with what is apparent in certain types of visions and apparitions recorded by psychic research. One wonders whether the Egpytian ideas may not have been derived in this way, just as primitive Animism and its doctrines seem to have been derived from similar phenomena. But whether so or not, the theory of the soul and its survival has more detailed interest than that of oriental peoples and the nature of the life after death was more distinctly mapped out in the funerary rites and cere monies than with the religions of India, China, and Japan, though these latter did not lack in definite ideas.

5. Hebrew Beliefs

The Hebrews are noted for their monotheism both in respect to its firmness and purity. But this general view was superposed upon an earlier period of polytheism of which there are few traces, so thoroughly had the leaders of the montheistic cult eradicated polytheism from the better type of national thought. The literature, however, which makes this evident contains no evidence that the future life was an important part of the Hebrew's religious belief. The Old Testament is almost devoid of evidence that he believed in a future life at all. It was certainly not the key to their religion as it was that of Christianity. There are only a few indications of its existence in the Hebrew mind in the Old Testament, whatever may exist in Talmudic literature. They are the question of Job: "If a man die shall he live again" (Job 14:14), possibly the same author's statement: "And after my skin hath been destroyed, yet from (without) my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold and not another," (Job 19:26), and the whole history

of witchcraft as depicted in the Bible. Take also the ghost of Eliphaz in Job 4 and verses 12-17. The story of the witch of Endor is a clear proof of what went on when it could get any freedom and indicates a survival of the more primitive times when Animism prevailed here as elsewhere.

Saul, the King, who had himself persecuted and suppressed witchcraft, found himself in dire straits with the Philistines and sought the aid of the Witch of Endor. She called up the dead prophet Samuel, complaining that he could not longer get divine aid either by the prophets or dreams. The whole incident makes very clear what the Judaism in power had supplanted, and it only repeats what left better traces of itself in the religions of China and Japan. The dreams of Joseph indicate the same general system. The suppression of human sacrifices points to what existed. prior to developed Judaism, and the prophets were the more intellectual and ethical leaders of the people, resembling Buddha and others in their mission, but claiming a relation to the divine that made them more rational teachers of this than witchcraft was or could be.

Probably it was the revolt against the cult of primitive Animism that destroyed, as in India and China, the dominance of that primitive system. At any rate the cult was originally there and kept itself alive against the laws intended to suppress it, while the inferiority of its ethics availed to retire the immortality of the soul into the background of Hebrew interest and left an Idealistic monotheism with strong government in its place.

The doctrine of angels implied a spiritual world whether it included man in it or not. But the idea of Sheol implied the survival of man. The idea is clear in Daniel 12:2, where the doctrine of the resurrection is indicated: "And many of them that sleep

in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt." But the doctrine was not the basis of the Judaistic religion. That was the existence of God, and a future life was secondary in interest. Like all the revolts against savage Animism and its practises Judaism turned to the theistic and ethical system for guidance. Taoism, Buddhism, Brahmanism, and other systems, when objecting to or compromising with Animistic beliefs and the superstitions of the uncultured sought to protect life and its meaning by some sort of philosophy and ethics, sometimes defending immortality, but always minimizing the conceptions of the uncultured people. Judaism seems to have been no exception. While the belief in immortality was evidently retained as taken for granted or could not be uprooted from the ordinary mind, the intellectual classes fell back, as later Christianity did, on a theistic and ethical scheme for the defense of both individual and social systems. Its monotheism probably originated in the same intellectual conditions that made Xenophanes in Greece.

6. Zoroastrianism

This was the final religion of Persia and followed the Animistic period of belief as Taoism and Buddhism had done in China and India. It was unique in that it was directly opposed to the pantheistic conceptions of Buddhism both in respect to the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. It was a system of Dualism as opposed to the Monism of the other oriental nations. This means that it held to the existence of two eternal principles, the Good and the Evil, or God and Satan as expressed in the Christian system. Buddhism held to one eternal being from which all else was created or rather formed. Zoroastrianism made good

and evil distinct and would not trace their source to one being. Hence it was emphatic in regard to the freedom of the will. Zoroaster believed in spirits both good and evil and that man's life here was a preparation for the next. The result to man in the future existence awaiting him was determined by his life on earth and he was in need of prophets to guide him through his earthly life. His system had a doctrine of Judgment, and a heaven much like that of Christianity, a fact to be noted because of the light which it throws upon the belief in a life hereafter as one of the most important ideas in the system. There is no trace in it of ancestor worship. It did not build upon that, as did Taoism and Buddhism. It may have so thoroughly supplanted it as to leave no traces of it in particular, though probably this is true only of the cult in the higher classes which held the belief.

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CHAPTER III

GRECO-ROMAN IDEAS

HESE two civilizations are closely related to each other in their political and economic institutions, though differing also as widely as they resemble each other. It was their proximity to each other and their contemporaneous existence that brought them into various connections. Their religion and belief in a future life are the two subjects of interest to us here and nothing else. The records of their later beliefs, philosophical and religious, are comparatively copious. Those of other nations, save India, are not so full. Those of Greece and Rome are sufficient to form tolerably clear conceptions of their religious beliefs, though the primitive ages upon which their interesting civilization was superposed are perhaps more effectually destroyed than the primitive ideas of India, China, and Japan. The Pelasgians and Dorians who represented predecessors of the Greeks and the Etruscans, who seem to have been the immediate predecessors of the Romans, have left little or nothing of their religious ideas and there is no such evidence that the Greeks compromised with the Dorians and Pelasgians, or the Romans with the Etruscans, as did the Taoists and Buddhists with the Animism of prior times. They may have done so to some extent and mythology, in connection with their polytheism, distinctly favors this view with the limitations apparent at the same time. But their intellectual and political culture observed few traces of the past except to reject or despise them