2 was bidden to have no care or anxiety to return to his kinsfolk now that he has departed for ever and aye, for his consolation must be that they too will end their labours, and go whither he has gone before. Among the Basutos, where the belief in a future life in Hades is general, some imagine in this under-world valleys ever green, and herds of hornless speckled cattle owned by the dead; but it seems more generally thought that the shades wander about in silent calm, experiencing neither joy nor sorrow. Moral retribution there is none. The Hades of the West African seems no ecstatic paradise, to judge by Captain Burton's description: "It was said of the old Egyptians that they lived rather in Hades than upon the banks of the Nile. The Dahomans declare that this world is man's plantation, the next is his home,-a home which, however, no one visits of his own accord. They of course own no future state of rewards and punishments: there the King will be a King, and the slave a slave for ever. Ku-to-men, or Deadman's land, the Dahoman's other but not better world, is a country of ghosts, of umbræ, who, like the spirits of the nineteenth century in Europe, lead a quiet life, except when by means of mediums they are drawn into the drawing-rooms of the living." With some such hopeless expectation the neighbours of the Dahomans, the Yorubas, judge the life to come in their simple proverb that "A corner in this world is better than a corner in the world of spirits." 3 The Finns, who feared the ghosts of the departed as unkind, harmful beings, fancied them dwelling with their bodies in the grave, or else, with what Castrén thinks a later philosophy, assigned them their dwelling in the subterranean Tuonela. Tuonela was like this upper earth, the sun shone there, there was no lack of land and water, wood and field, tilth and meadow, there were bears and wolves, snakes and pike, but all things were of a hurtful, dismal kind, the woods dark and swarming with wild beasts, the water black, 1 Sahagun, 'Hist. de Nueva España,' book iii. appendix ch. i., in Kingsborough, vol. vii.; Brasseur, vol. iii. p. 571. 2 Casalis, Basutos,' pp. 247, 254. 3 Burton, 'Dahome,' vol. ii. p. 156; 'Tr. Eth. Soc.' vol. iii. p. 403; 'Wit and Wisdom from W. Afr.' pp. 280, 449 ; See J. G. Müller, p. 140. the cornfields bearing seed of snakes' teeth, and there stern pitiless old Tuoni, and his grim wife and son with the hooked fingers with iron points, kept watch and ward over the dead lest they should escape.' Scarce less dismal was the classic ideal of the dark realm below, whither the shades of the dead must go to join the many gone before (ès πλeóvwv ikéσdai; penetrare ad plures; andare tra i più). The Roman Orcus holds the pallid souls, rapacious Orcus, sparing neither good nor bad. Gloomy is the Greek land of Hades, dark dwelling of the images of departed mortals, where the shades carry at once their living features and their dying wounds, and glide and cluster and whisper and lead the shadow of a life. Like the savage hunter on his ghostly prairie, the great Orion still bears his brazen mace, still chases over the meadows of asphodel the flying beasts he slew of yore in the lonely mountains. Like the rude African of to-day, the swift-footed Achilles scorns such poor, thin, shadowy life; rather would he serve a mean man upon earth than be lord of all the dead. Truly, oxen and goodly sheep may be taken for booty, Where and what was Sheol, the dwelling of the ancient Jewish dead? Though its description is so suggested by the dark, quiet, inevitable cavern-tomb, that the two conceptions melt together in Hebrew poetic phrase, nevertheless Sheol is not a mere general term for burial-places. Nations to whom the idea of a subterranean region of departed spirits was a familiar thought, with familiar words to express it, quite naturally use these words in Biblical translation as the equivalents of Sheol. To the Greek Septuagint, Sheol was Hades, and for this the Coptic translators had their long-inherited Egyptian name of Amenti, while the Vulgate renders it as Infernus, the lower regions. The Gothic Ulfilas, for the Hades 1 Castrén, 'Finn. Myth.' p. 126, etc.; Kalewala, Rune xv. xvi. xlv. etc.; Meiners, vol. ii. p. 780. 2 Homer. Il. ix. 405; Odyss. xi. 218, 475; Virg. Æn. vi. 243, etc. etc. of the New Testament, could use Halja in its old German sense of the dim shadowy home of the dead below the earth; and the corresponding word Hell, if this its earlier sense be borne in mind, fairly translates Sheol and Hades in the English version of the Old and New Testament, though the word has become misleading to uneducated ears by being used also in the sense of Gehenna, the place of torment. The early Hebrew historians and prophets, holding out neither the hope of everlasting glory nor the fear of everlasting agony as guiding motives for man's present life, lay down little direct doctrine of a future state, yet their incidental mentions justify the translators who regard Sheol as a Hades. Sheol is a special locality where dead men go to their dead ancestors: "And Isaac gave up the ghost, and died, and was gathered unto his people and his sons Esau and Jacob buried him." Abraham, though not even buried in the land of his forefathers, is thus "gathered unto his people ;" and Jacob has no thought of his body being laid with Joseph's body, torn by wild beasts in the wilderness, when he says, "I shall go down to my son mourning to Sheol" (" els adov" in the LXX., "èpesēt èàmenti" in the Coptic, "in infernum" in the Vulgate). Sheol ( from) is, as its name implies, a cavernous recess, yet it is no mere surface-grave or tomb, but an under-world of awful depth: "High as Heaven, what doest thou? deeper than Sheol, what knowest thou?" "Though they dig into Sheol, thence shall mine hand take them; though they climb up to Heaven, thence will I bring them down." Thither Jew and Gentile go down: "What man liveth, and shall not see death? shall he deliver his soul from the hand of Sheol?" Asshur and all her company, Elam and all her multitude, the mighty fallen of the uncircumcised, lie there. The great king of Babylon must go down: שאול) "Sheol from beneath is moved because of thee, to meet thee at thy coming: He rouseth for thee the mighty dead, all the great chiefs of the earth; He maketh to rise up from their thrones, all the kings of the nations. All of them shall accost thee, and shall say unto thee: Art thou, even thou too, become weak as we? Art thou made like unto us?" The rephaim, the "shades" of the dead, who dwell in Sheol, love not to be disturbed from their rest by the necromancer; "And Samuel said to Saul, why hast thou disquieted me to bring me up?" Yet their quiet is contrasted in a tone of sadness with the life on earth; "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in Sheol, whither thou goest."1 Such thoughts of the life of the shades below did not disappear when, in the later years of the Jewish nation, the great change in the doctrine of the future life passed in so large a measure over the Hebrew mind, their earlier thoughts of ghostly continuance giving place to the doctrines of resurrection and retribution. The ancient ideas have even held their place on into Christian thought, in pictures like that of the Limbus Patrum, the Hades where Christ descended to set free the patriarchs. The Retribution-theory of the future life comprises in a general way the belief in different grades of future happiness, especially in different regions of the other world allotted to men according to their lives in this. This doctrine of retribution is, as we have already seen, far from universal among mankind, many races recognizing the idea of a spirit outliving the body, without considering the fate of this spirit to depend at all upon the conduct of the living man. The doctrine of retribution hardly seems an original part of the doctrine of the future life. On the contrary, if we judge that men in a primitive state of culture arrived at the notion of a surviving spirit, and that some races, but by no means all, afterwards reached the further stage of recognizing a retribution for deeds done in the body, this theory will not, so far as I know, be discountenanced by facts. Even among the higher savages, however, a connexion between man's 1 Gen. xxxv. 29;"xxv. 8; xxxvii. 35; Job xi. 8; Amos ix. 2; Psalm lxxxix. 48; Ezek. xxxi., xxxii.; Isaiah xiv. 9, xxxviii. 10-18; 1 Sam. xxviii. 15 Eccles. ix. 10. See Alger, Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life," ch. viii.; F. W. Farrar in Smith's 'Dic. of the Bible,' art. "hell." 2 The doctrine of reversal, as in Kamschatka, where rich and poor will change places in the other world (Steller, pp. 269–72), is too exceptional in the lower culture to be generalized. See Steinhauser, Rel. des Negers,' 1. c. p. 135. A Wolof proverb is "The more powerful one is in this world, the more servile one will be in the next." (Burton, 'Wit and Wisdom,' p. 28.) life and his happiness or misery after death is often held as a definite article of theology, and thence it is to be traced onward through barbaric religions, and into the very heart of Christianity. The grounds of future reward and punishment are indeed so far from uniform among the religions of the world, that they may differ widely within what is considered one and the same creed. The result is more definite than the cause, the end than the means. Men who alike look forward to a region of unearthly happiness beyond the grave, hope to reach that happy land by roads so strangely different, that the path of life which leads one nation to eternal bliss may seem to the next the very descent into the pit. In noticing among savage and barbaric peoples the qualifications which determine future happiness or misery, we may with some distinctness define these as being excellence, valour, social rank, religious ordinance. On the whole, however, the alternatives we find in the lower range of culture, unless where they may have been affected by contact with higher religions, seem scarcely what modern cultured nations call moral compensation. A comparison of the two great doctrines as held in the higher and lower culture may perhaps justify a tentative speculation as to their actual sequence in history. The idea of the next life being similar to this seems to have developed into the idea that what gives prosperity and renown here will give it also there, and thus earthly conditions carry on their contrasts into the changed world after death. In fact, a number of accounts recorded among savages show an intermediate condition between the continuance-theory and the retribution-theory of the future life, so as even to favour the opinion that through such stages the doctrine of simple future existence was developed into the doctrine of future reward and punishment, a transition which for its import to human life has scarcely its rival in the history of religion. It may help us to judge the possibility of an early idea of mere continuance in a future life having developed into a later doctrine of judicial retribution, if we collect here some evidence, mostly from the lower culture, as to the supposed causes of happiness and misery in another life. The effect of earthly rank on |