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Essays on the Parsees.* No one of them, except that ascribed to Theopompos,t makes any reference to the future state. We shall see presently what a place this doctrine occupied in the earlier times of Zoroastrianism.

The political relations of Greece with the Egyptian empire appear to have been important in the prehistoric period; but the notices of them are few and undetermined. In the great literary age, they were of secondary concern. It has become well known, from the monuments, how powerfully the doctrine of the future life was developed in the archaic religion of Egypt. It was not to be expected that the classical period should here supply us with information such as it has furnished with respect to the religion of Persia. But Herodotos was led, partly by the peculiarities of the case of Egypt generally, and partly from his acknowledging a certain early connection between its religion and that of Greece, to devote more than forty sections of his second Book to his account of it. Yet that principal account does not contain one word of reference to future retribution, or of belief in the existence of the soul after death; although in another portion of his work we shall see that he mentions the primitive Egyptian teaching.

The fifteenth Satire of Juvenal censures in the strongest terms the Egyptian religion of his own day, at once debased and fanatical. He then closes the satire in an ethical strain of remarkable loftiness; and it might be thought that, had future retribution been a living and prominent portion of the Egyptian religion of his day, he could hardly have avoided making some reference to it, especially as he appears to have been himself a believer in the unseen world.§ But in the Isis et Osiris of Plutarch, I find a passage which, if I understand it rightly, signifies that the Egyptian priests of his time had become somewhat ashamed of the old definite, circumstantial teaching of their religion concerning Osiris, as the judge of

* Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the Parsees, by Dr. Martin Haug. Edited and enlarged by Dr. West. (London, 1890.) Essay I. pp. 3-16. + P. 9.

Sat. ii. 149 sqq.

Vol. ii. 35-76.

Plut. de Is. et Os. 382. 37. TOUTо, ÖTEр ol νῦν ἱερεῖς ἀφοσιούμενοι καὶ παρακαλυπτόμενοι μετ' ευλαβειας υποδηλοῦσιν.

each dead man and lord of the Underworld, in that it savored too much of matter, or was in some way behind the age. Again, Iamblichus, writing in the age of Constantine, and discussing the Egyptian religion, assigns to it a high rank, but does not seem to include the idea of a future state among its motive powers.* Thus, then, the doctrine of the future state, if viewed as a working portion of religion, lost force and did not gain it with the lapse of time under the Egyptian system, which had been so famous for its early inculcation.

Undoubtedly this seems to have been the case also with the Greeks. The genius of that extraordinary people does not appear at any time to have qualified or inclined them to adopt with anything like earnestness or force that belief, which is so marked in the religions of Egypt and of Persia at an early date. Homer is here our principal authority and what we gather from the Odyssey is that the Underworld of the Poet is evidently an exotic and imported conception, made up of elements which were chiefly supplied from the religions of Egypt and Assyria. We may also observe that the place he finds for it lies in the outer zone of his geography, beyond the great encircling River Okeanos. In the Iliad, the great national and patriotic poem of Homer, the doctrine of the future life appears only in the case of Patroklos, and there only as a vague, remote, and shadowy image. The Egyptian name for the kingdom of the dead was Amenti, which seems to reappear in the Greek Rhadamanthos. There is a singular circumstance associated with one of the discoveries of Schliemann at Mycenæ. In a tomb fifteen feet six inches in length, and only five feet six inches in breadth, the bodies of full-grown men are laid not along but across the space, being thus squeezed in the strangest manner. But they were in this way made to lie east and west, and toward the west such we learn was the position in which the Egyptians laid their dead. Minos is also introduced to us as a personage in the Underworld of the Odyssey, and he is engaged in administering justice. So far we follow the Egyptian idea. But the Greek spirit took the heart and life out of * Iamblichus de Mysteriis, 159-9. (Lugduni 1577.)

and

Schliemann's Mycenae, xxxii. iii, and 295.

the realm of Osiris. Minos sits, so to speak, not as a criminal but as a civil judge he does not punish the guilty for their misdeeds on earth, but simply meets the wants of a community for an arbitrator of determining authority in their affairs.* No one, whom we can certainly call a compatriot of Homer's, appears in the Underworld as under penal suffering: not, for instance, Aigisthos, or Klutaimnestra, who might have been fit subjects for it. In the ethical code of Homer, there is no clear recognition of penalty for sin; except it be for perjury upon the breach of great public pacts; and this penalty is made applicable to gods and men alike. The only case, in which he associates the existence after death with happiness, is that of Menelaos. Menelaos is among the purest characters of the Poems: but the reason given for his fortunate lot is, that he was the husband of Helen, and son-inlaw of Zeus. It is, however, plain that there must have been a general belief in a future state among his contemporaries, or we should not find it as we now find it embodied and developed in a poem essentially popular.

It was, then, an article of the national belief in the heroic age. What became of it in the classical period? It faded out of notice. There grew up instead of it that remarkable idea of the self-sufficiency of life, which became a basis for Greek existence. Apart from particular exceptions, and from the mysteries, which remained always only mysteries for the people, things temporal and things seen affixed all round a limit to human interests. The Underworld could not have been treated as it is treated by Aristophanes, in any country except one where for the mind of the people at large it had ceased to have a really religious existence. The disputed existence which it obtained in some of the philosophical schools is itself a witness to the fact that for man as such, in the wear and tear of centuries, the idea had not, upon the whole, gained ground, but lost it, among the most intellectual people ever known.

Have we not then to wait for the evidence which is to show that the doctrine of immortality would have been too great a strain for the Hebrews at the reputed era of the composition of the Psalms under

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David and Solomon, and that it was mercifully withheld from primitive man who could only feed on milk, to be administered as strong meat to a later and more mature generation?

Even were such evidence to be forthcoming on behalf of the general proposition, we should still have to ask how it is known, or why it is to be believed, that the idea of immortality was made known to the Hebrews from Persian sources? The Captivity was not a Persian, but a Babylonian captivity.. The advent of Persian power brought it to a close. It was Magianism, rather than Zoroastrianism, that the political influence of Persia at the time would have been likely to impart. But what proof is there, during the period which followed the return, and preceded the Greek supremacy, of this kind of Persian influence over the Hebrew people? The adoption of Persian words in the popular language was a general fruit of Persian power, and is said not to have included subjects of religion.* But I pas on to the second of the three heads which have been proposed.

II.

The six Psalms, indicated by Professor Cheyne as those in which the hope of inmortality may perhaps be traced, all lie within the first, that is, speaking generally, the older portion of the Psalter. For those who suppose them to have belonged to the worship of Solomon's temple, and who are glad to follow Professor Chey ne when he proves that they embody the hope of a future life, it would be somewhat anomalous to believe that, while the public service taught this doctrine, no inark of it had been left, outside the Temple walls, upon the historical books of the Old Testament, or in the sense of the people. True, the doctrine of a future existence is not prominent upon the face of the older Scriptures. Neither, it might perhaps be said, is it very conspicuous in the speech and actions of the Pharisees in the Gospels, who notwithstanding are known to have held it. But yet we should expect to find some traces of it and our Lord has actually taught us that it is conveyed in the declaration that God was the God of Abraham and of Isaac and Jacob;

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* Haug, p. 5.

a saying of which the force can hardly be escaped by the plea that He was interpreting ancient lore in conformity with the current opinion of the people.

In the Authorized, and also in the Revised, Version of Gen. v. 24, we read the words,

And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.

The rendering of the Septuagint is that he pleased God, and that he was not found, for God transposed or transplanted him. The natural sense of the words taken from the Hebrew is the necessary sense of the Greek and it appears that it is adopt ed by the various Targums.* Is it possible rationally to put any interpretation on this verse, except one which conveys the idea just as the Septuagint has put it, and

shows that life in the unseen world was a conception accepted both by the author of the verse, and by those for whom it was written? Such is the sense given to it in

Ecclesiasticus xliv. 16 and in Heb. xi. 5.

burton in the Divine Legation may have been made instrumental to consequences for which its author is not really responsible. What he argued was, that Moses never would have promulgated his system, devoid as it was of sanctions from the doctrine of a future state, unless he had been divinely commissioned and inspired. But around this fair and probable argument there has gathered a varied group of errors, with this main one at the head, that the religion taught by Moses was the entire religion of the patriarchs and of the ancient Hebrew nation; or that at the least it was, as a religion, an advance upon the patriarchal religion, a kind of halfway house between it and Christianity, so that to look beyond it for any truths of Hebrew belief, which it does not contain, is to recede from the light into the darkness.

There are, indeed, delivered by Moses certain broad enunciations of principle, which appertain to the habitual religion of the individual and may truly be called Such is the sense given by Bishop Browne spiritual commandments. In part, the inin the Speaker's Bible, by Fuller in the junctions of the Decalogue have this charStudent's Bible, by Bishop Patrick adopt-acter; but they do not seem to mark the ed into Mant's Bible, by Grotius, Fagius, and others in the Critici Sacri. But I will not pursue further this enumeration in a case which does not seem to leave

room for doubt. I will only add that the legend of Ganymede, according to the beautiful form which it bears in the Iliad, with just so much of descent from the loftiness of the old Hebrew tradition as we might have expected, seems to owe its origin to the translation of Enoch.

There seems to subsist a vague, but widespread, impression that the Hebrews of ancient times were not made aware of the existence after death. In the direction of this untrue notion, two concessions

I believe, and two only, can be made.

The first is, that the future state is nowhere proclaimed by Moses. The second, that a national and public dispensation of rewards and punishments, purely temporal, may have had a certain tendency to throw into the shade in the individual mind the doctrine of our surviving corporal dissolution. And, for us of this day, it is possible that the argument of War

*Bishop Browne, in the Speaker's Commentary, in loc.

In loco by each of these respectively.
Iliad, xx. 232-5.

point of loftiest elevation reached by the declarations of Moses. The principle of love is not expressly contained (unless as to parents only) in the ten precepts; al. though room, so to speak, is made for it to occupy, by the exclusion of false gods, by the re-injunction of the sabbatical rest

for it may, after the Assyrian discoveries, with increased confidence be described as a revival-and by the negatives so rigorously put upon crime and appetite. But may it not be said that those negative forms, and that revival of the sabbath, of themselves point to something higher? The acme of the declarations of Moses ap18), where it is proclaimed that a man is peats to be reached first in Leviticus (xix. to love his neighbor as he loves himself; and further, in Deuteronomy (vi. 5), that he is to love the Lord his God with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his strength. These injunctions fill the space left open by the Decalogue. Is there any reason for regarding them as novelties, first taught from or after Sinai? It is easy indeed to comprehend the appropriate wisdom of their solemn republication after the children of Israel had so

*Smith, Assyrian Discoveries, p. 12.

long dwelt in the midst of a corrupt idolatry, and so far as we know without the advantage either of a fixed code or of positive institutions,* to cherish and keep alive the truths which their fathers had possessed. True, these great principles of religion are nowhere taught in the Book of Genesis as precepts; but neither is belief in God, or any other part of the religion of the patriarchs, set out in a creed or a code. We only see it live and work and are not these great principles of love to God and man the very same principles, which made Enoch too good to remain under the conditions of an earthly life, and which fashioned the faultless character of Joseph ?

The Mosaic law was neither the full enunciation of a personal religion for individuals, nor an instrument for educating a nation into counsels of perfection. In truth, it dealt with the nation rather than with its component members, and laid down precepts for each of these only in so far as it was necessary to maintain them as a community separated from the rest, to testify against idolatry by the worship of one God, to exhibit through its ritual and sacrificial system the character of sin, to cherish the expectation of a coming deliverance, and in the meantime, and until the fulness of time should come, to gird about an encircled space, a vineyard in a very fruitful hill;" within which a spiritual worship, and the lives befitting it, might have full and unhindered growth upon the basis traditionally known to the fathers of the race.

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But it may without difficulty be shown that, while the Mosaic law was a law of temporal sanctions only, the people did not fall so low, in the scale either of nature or of grace, as to suppose that the life of man is at an end when his remains are laid in the ground that they did not sink so far beneath the other nations of remote antiquity, none of which appear to have entertained that dishonoring and dangerous belief, though they varied from others

It is at any rate remarkable that the reason given for the release of the children of Israel from Egypt is (Exod. vii, 16; viii. 20) that they may serve God in the wilderness; and again it appears, from Exod. viii. 20-23, that they could not perform the proper sacrifices to God in Egypt, but must go into the wilderness for the purpose.

+ Isaiah v. 1.

in the prominence which their systems assigned to the positive doctrine on the subject. It might perhaps be sufficient to cite the care taken and cost incurred by them in the sepulture of the dead, as proofs that when burial was accomplished they did not think all was over. But more pointed proofs are not deficient. Let us take, for instance, the case of the prophet Elijah. In his lifetime, he must have been a character as conspicuous as the sovereigns of the country; while, after his death, it appears that a living tradition of his greatness made him the special type of the prophetic office, both in the mouth of Malachi, and when four more centuries had elapsed at the Transfiguration of our Saviour.* It will not, I suppose, be disputed, that the Hebrews received as true the history of his being corporally transported into heaven an occurrence, which we are specially informed that fifty men of the sons of the prophets stood to witness from a distance, while Elijah and Elisha passed over Jordan together. it possible that a people, who believed this prophet had thus been carried up from earth, believed also that with that miraculous transportation his existence came to an end?

Is

Still more remarkable, upon the point now before us, is the proof of the popular belief afforded by the practice of necromancy among the people. The whole basis of such a practice lies in an established popular conviction that the spirits of the departed not only existed, but existed in a state of susceptible faculty, and might be moved, by influences exercised in this world, to make apparition before the eyes of the living. It appears, indeed, that this practice was viewed by the governing powers with jealousy, for the woman, who had "the familiar spirit," urged, when application was made to her, that it was dangerous for her to comply, because Saul had" cut off those that have familiar spirits, and the wizard out of the land." Under such circumstances, as the prohibitions of the Mosaic law were no dead letter, the profession of the witch could only be kept alive by strong inducements; and what strong inducement could there be, except a curiosity of the people for direct information about the dead,

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which involved the certainty of their continuing existence ?

King Saul finds himself placed in desperate straits by the attack of the Philistine army, at the time when David was serving in its ranks. Samuel, the mainstay of the State, had recently died, and had been solemnly mourned for by the people. Saul was driven, in order to obtain the benefit of indispensable counsel, to seek the aid of those whom he had attempted to extirpate. Failing to obtain light upon the emergency by any of the ordinary means, he requires his servants to find for him a woman with a familiar spirit. He is referred to such a person, who lives at Endor. He repairs to ber in disguise, evidently believing that, though she would of course regard the king as her enemy, yet, if he could pass for one of the people, she would meet his desire, and evoke the spirit of the dead in the regular way of business. She recognizes the king, and he has to give her a promise of indemnity. Samuel is then brought up; and a scene is reported to have taken place, in which his spirit addresses King Saul, and, in the exercise of the gift of prophecy, announces that his kingdom was to depart from him. Such is the narrative, which would appear to imply the reality of the apparition. Both the rabbinical commentators, however, and the Christian writers, are divided upon this question down to the present day.* But this is a matter wholly apart from the present argument, which simply rests upon the fact that there was a general belief in such apparitions, a belief extending even to the king upon the throne. The measures taken by Saul for the suppression of necromancy and all witchcraft, may have been adopted in obedience to the stringent and repeated prohibitions contained in the law. Those prohibitions do not expressly name intercourse with the dead, but this, I apprehend, cannot be excluded from the general scope of the profession; and, if so, the number and nature of the prohibitions is a fresh testimony to the

*See Grotius, Muneterus, and others, in the Critici Sacri; and, of recent commentators, Adam Clarke, the Speaker's Bible, the Student's Bible, Mant, and Thomas Scott. Modern English commentators for the most part affirm the reality.

+ Exodus xxii. 18; Levit. xix. 21, xxx. 6; Deut. xviii, 10.

popular belief in the existence of the soul after death, and seems to indicate its continuity among the Israelites from the time of Moses onward.

It is not now the question how far this belief was developed, or how far it was operative on conduct. We have no proof from Scripture that it implied the punishment of bad men in the other world, though the cases of Enoch and Elijah may fairly stand as indicating the rewards of those who were pre-eminently good. Neither again in the Psalms is the penal part of the doctrine of a future life as plainly discernible, as the portion which concerns the rest and peace of saints. As we see from Homer, the ideas of future retribution and of future existence have not a necessary, though they have an appropriate, connection. My proposition amounts simply to this: that, as in the time of our Lord, so in the pre-exilic periods, the Hebrew race in general did not believe in the extinction of the soul at death: and that, as to the completeness and moral power of this belief, we do not seem to have evidence requiring or entitling us to draw any very broad distinction in favor of one period as against another. Thus much I have admitted: that, as the theocratic system of Moses, aided by the order of prophets, worked in the earlier time in a manner more legible, so to speak, by the people, than after the exile, and as this may have tended somewhat to confine or weaken the habit of mind which resorts to future sanctions, so the post-exilic period, or that large part of it which was passed in a condition of political dependence, may to some extent have been favorable to a more active sense of the future life. But nowhere does a necessity seem to arise for supposing that the Jews received any large infusion of positive doctrine on the subject of a future state from the circumstances of the Babylonish captivity, or from Persian influences after its close.

III.

If, then, it is admitted, even by those who favor the argument followed in these pages, that the doctrine of a future state nowhere entered into the prescriptions of the Mosaic law, and is not directly declared and inculcated in the earliest Scriptures, it probably subsisted among the Hebrews rather as a private opinion, than as

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