No wonder that this spot should have been since identified with St. Patrick’s Purgatory, and that some ingenious etymologist should have found in the name of ‘Ulster’ a corruption of ‘Ulyssisterra,’ and a commemoration of the hero’s visit.^[153]

Thirdly, the belief in a subterranean Hades peopled by the ghosts of the dead is quite common among the lower races. The earth is flat, say the Italmen of Kamchatka, for if it were round, people would fall off; it is the wrong side of another heaven, which covers another earth below, whither the dead will go down to their new life, and so, as Steller says, their mundane system is like a tub with three bottoms.^[154] In North America, the Tacullis held that the soul goes after death into the bowels of the earth, whence it can come back in human shape to visit friends.^[155] In South America, Brazilian souls travel down to the world below in the West, and Patagonian souls will depart to enjoy eternal drunkenness in the caves of their ancestral deities.^[156] The New Zealander who says ‘The sun has returned to Hades’ (kua hoki mai te Ra ki te Rua), simply means that it has set. When a Samoan Islander dies, the host of spirits that surround the house, waiting to convey his soul away, set out with him crossing the land and swimming the sea, to the entrance of the spirit-world. This is at the westernmost point of the westernmost island, Savaii, and there one may see the two circular holes or basins where souls descend, chiefs by the bigger and plebeians by the smaller, into the regions of the under-world. There below is a heaven, earth, and sea, and people with real bodies, planting, fishing, cooking, as in the present life; but at night their bodies become like a confused collection of fiery sparks, and in this state during the hours of darkness they come up to revisit their former abodes, retiring at dawn to the bush or to the lower regions.^[157] For the state of thought on this subject among rude African tribes, it is enough to cite the Zulus, who at death will descend to live in Hades among their ancestors, the ‘Abapansi,’ the ‘people underground.’^[158] Among rude Asiatic tribes, such an example may be taken from the Karens. They are not quite agreed where Plu, the land of the dead, is situate; it may be above the earth or beyond the horizon. But the dominant and seemingly indigenous opinion is that it is below the earth. When the sun sets on earth, it rises in the Karen Hades, and when it sets in Hades it rises in this world. Here, again, the familiar belief of the European peasant is found; the spirits of the dead may come up from the land of shades by night, but at daybreak must return.^[159]

Such ideas, developed by uncultured races, may be followed up in various detail, through the stage of religion represented by the Mexican and Peruvian nations,^[160] into higher ranges of culture. The Roman Orcus was in the bowels of the earth, and when the ‘lapis manalis,’ the stone that closed the mouth of the world below, was moved away on certain solemn days, the ghosts of the dead came up to the world above, and partook of the offerings of their friends.^[161] Among the Greeks, the Land of Hades was in the world below, nor was the thought unknown that it was the sunset realm of the Western god (πρὸς ἑσπέρου θεοῦ). What Hades seemed like to the popular mind, Lucian thus describes:—‘The great crowd, indeed, whom the wise call “idiots,” believing Homer and Hesiod, and the other myth-makers about these things, and setting up their poetry as a law, have supposed a certain deep place under the earth, Hades, and that it is vast, and roomy, and gloomy, and sunless, and how thought to be lighted up so as to behold every one within, I know not.’^[162] In the ancient Egyptian doctrine of the future life, modelled on solar myth, the region of the departed combines the under-world and the west, Amenti; the dead passes the gate of the setting sun to traverse the roads of darkness, and behold his father Osiris; and with this solar thought the Egyptian priests, representing in symbolic ceremony the scenes of the other world, carried the corpse in the sacred boat across to the burial-place, on the western side of the sacred lake.^[163] So, too, the cavernous Sheol of the Israelites, the shadowy region of departed souls, lay deep below the earth. Through the great Aryan religious systems, Brahmanism, Zarathustrism, Buddhism, and onward into the range of Islam and of Christianity, subterranean hells of purgatory or punishment make the doleful contrast to heavens of light and glory.

It is, however, a point worthy of special notice that the conception of hell as a fiery abyss, so familiar to the religions of the higher civilization, is all but unknown to savage thought, so much so that if met with, its genuineness is doubtful. Captain John Smith’s ‘History of Virginia,’ published in 1624, contains two different accounts of the Indians’ doctrine of a future life. Smith’s own description is of a land beyond the mountains, toward sunset, where chiefs and medicine-men in paint and feathers shall smoke, and sing, and dance with their forefathers, while the common people have no life after death, but rot in their graves. Heriot’s description is of tabernacles of the gods to which the good are taken up to perpetual happiness, while the wicked are carried to ‘Popogusso,’ a great pit which they think to be at the furthest parts of the world where the sun sets, and there burn continually.^[164] Now knowing so much as we do of the religion of the Algonquins, to whom these Virginians belonged, we may judge that while the first account is genuinely native, though perhaps not quite correctly understood, the second was borrowed by the Indians from the white men themselves. Yet even here the touch of solar myth is manifest, and the description of the fiery abyss in the region of sunset may be compared with one from our own country, in the Anglo-Saxon dialogue of Saturn and Solomon. ‘Saga me forhwan byth seo sunne read on æfen? Ic the secge, forthon heo locath on helle.—Tell me, why is the sun red at even? I tell thee, because she looketh on hell.’^[165] To the same belief belongs another striking mythic feature. The idea of volcanos being mouths of the under-world seems not unexampled among the lower races, for we hear of certain New Zealanders casting their dead down into a crater.^[166] But in connexion with the thought of a gehenna of fire and brimstone, Vesuvius, Etna, and Hecla had spiritual as well as material terrors to the mind of Christendom, for they were believed to be places of purgatory or the very mouths of the pit where the souls of the damned were cast down.^[167] The Indians of Nicaragua used in old times to offer human sacrifices to their volcano Masaya, flinging the corpses into the crater, and in later years, after the conversion of the country, we hear of Christian confessors sending their penitents to climb the mountain, and (as a glimpse of hell) to look down upon the molten lava.^[168]

Fourthly, in old times and new, it has come into men’s minds to fix upon the sun and moon as abodes of departed souls. When we have learnt from the rude Natchez of the Mississippi and the Apalaches of Florida that the sun is the bright dwelling of departed chiefs and braves, and have traced like thoughts on into the theologies of Mexico and Peru, then we may compare these savage doctrines with Isaac Taylor’s ingenious supposition in his ‘Physical Theory of Another Life,’—the sun of each planetary system is the house of the higher and ultimate spiritual corporeity, and the centre of assembly to those who have passed on the planets their preliminary era of corruptible organization. Or perhaps some may prefer the Rev. Tobias Swinden’s book, published in the last century, and translated into French and German, which proved the sun to be hell, and its dark spots gatherings of damned souls.^[169] And when in South America the Saliva Indians have pointed out the moon, their paradise where no mosquitos are, and the Guaycurus have shown it as the home of chiefs and medicine-men deceased, and the Polynesians of Tokelau in like manner have claimed it as the abode of departed kings and chiefs, then these pleasant fancies may be compared with Plutarch’s description of the virtuous souls who after purification in the middle space gain their footing on the moon, and there are crowned as victors.^[170] The converse notion of the moon as the seat of hell, has been elaborated in profoundest bathos by Mr. M. F. Tupper:

Skin for skin, the brown savage is not ill matched in such speculative lore with the white philosopher.

Fifthly, as Paradise on the face of the earth, and Hades beneath it where the sun goes down, are regions whose existence is asserted or not denied by savage and barbaric science, so it is with Heaven. Among the examples which display for us the real course of knowledge among mankind, and the real relation which primitive bears to later culture, the belief in the existence of a firmament is one of the most instructive. It arises naturally in the minds of children still, and in accordance with the simplest childlike thought, the cosmologies of the North American Indians^[171] and the South Sea Islanders^[172] describe their flat earth arched over by the solid vault of heaven. Like thoughts are to be traced on through such details as the Zulu idea that the blue heaven is a rock encircling the earth, inside which are the sun, moon, and stars, and outside which dwell the people of heaven; the modern negro’s belief that there is a firmament stretched above like a cloth or web; the Finnish poem which tells how Ilmarinen forged the firmament of finest steel, and set in it the moon and stars.^[173] The New Zealander, with his notion of a solid firmament, through which the waters can be let down on earth through a crack or hole from the reservoir of rain above, could well explain the passage in Herodotus concerning that place in North Africa where, as the Libyans said, the sky is pierced, as well as the ancient Jewish conception of a firmament of heaven, ‘strong as a molten mirror,’ with its windows through which the rain pours down in deluge from the reservoirs above, windows which late Rabbinical literature tells us were made by taking out two stars.^[174] In nations where the theory of the firmament prevails, accounts of bodily journeys or spiritual ascents to heaven are in general meant not as figure, but as fact. Among the lower races, the tendency to localize the region of departed souls above the sky seems less strong than that which leads them to place their world of the dead on or below the earth’s surface. Yet some well-marked descriptions of a savage Heaven are on record, the following, and others to be cited presently. Even some Australians seem to think of going up to the clouds at death, to eat and drink, and hunt and fish as here.^[175] In North America, the Winnebagos placed their paradise in the sky, where souls travel along that ‘Path of the Dead’ which we call the Milky Way; and working out the ever-recurring solar idea, the modern Iroquois speak of the soul going upward and westward, till it comes out on the beauteous plains of heaven, with people and trees and things as on earth.^[176] In South America the Guarayos, representatives in some sort of the past condition of the Guarani race, worship Tamoi the Grandfather, the Ancient of Heaven; he was their first ancestor, who lived among them in old days and taught them to till the ground; then rising to heaven in the East he disappeared, having promised to be the helper of his people on earth, and to transport them, when they died, from the top of a sacred tree into another life, where they shall find their kindred and have hunting in plenty, and possess all that they possessed on earth; therefore it is that the Guarayos adorn their dead, and burn their weapons for them, and bury them with their faces to the East, whither they are to go.^[177] Among American peoples whose culture rose to a higher level than that of these savage tribes, we hear of the Peruvian Heaven, the glorious ‘Upper World,’ and of the temporary abode of Aztec warriors on heavenly wooded plains, where the sun shines when it is night on earth, wherefore it was a Mexican saying that the sun goes at evening to lighten the dead.^[178] What thoughts of heaven were in the minds of the old Aryan poets, this hymn from the Rig-Veda may show:—

In such bright vague thoughts from the poet’s religion of nature, or in cosmic schemes of ancient astronomy, with their artificial glories of barbaric architecture exaggerated in the skies, or in the raptures of mystic vision, or in the calmer teaching of the theologic doctrine of a future life, descriptions of realms of blessed souls in heaven are to be followed through the religions of the Brahman, the Buddhist, the Parsi, the later Jew, the Moslem, and the Christian.

For the object, not of writing a handbook of religions, but of tracing the relation which the religion of savages bears to the religion of cultured nations, these details are enough to show the general line of human thought regarding the local habitations of departed souls. It seems plain from the most cursory inspection of these various localizations, however much we may consider them as inherited or transmitted from people to people in the complex movements of theological history, that they are at any rate not derived from any single religion accepted among ancient or primæval men. They bear evident traces of independent working out in the varied definition of the region of souls, as on earth among men, on earth in some distant country, below the earth, above or beyond the sky. Similar ideas of this kind are found in different lands, but this similarity seems in large measure due to independent recurrence of thoughts so obvious. Not less is independent fancy compatible with the ever-recurring solar myth in such ideas, placing the land of Death in the land of Evening or of Night, and its entrance at the gates of Sunset. Barbaric poets of many a distant land must have gazed into the West to read the tale of Life and Death, and tell it of Man. If, however, we look more closely into the stages of intellectual history to which these theories of the Future World belong, it will appear that the assignment of the realm of departed souls to the three great regions, Earth, Hades, Heaven, has not been uniform. Firstly, the doctrine of a land of souls on Earth belongs widely and deeply to savage culture, but dwindles in the barbaric stage, and survives but feebly into the mediæval. Secondly, the doctrine of a subterranean Hades holds as large a place as this in savage belief, and has held it firmly along the course of higher religions, where, however, this under-world is looked on less and less as the proper abode of the dead, but rather as the dismal place of purgatory and hell. Lastly, the doctrine of a Heaven, floored upon a firmament, or placed in the upper air, seems in early savage belief less common than the other two, but yields to neither of them in its vigorous retention by the thought of modern nations. These local theories appear to be taken, firstly and mostly, in the most absolute literal sense, and although, under the influence of physical science, much that was once distinctly-meant philosophy has now passed among theologians into imagery and metaphor, yet at low levels of knowledge the new canons of interpretation find little acceptance, and even in modern Europe the rude cosmology of the lower races in no small measure retains its place.

Turning now to consider the state of the departed in these their new homes, we have to examine the definitions of the Future Life which prevail through the religions of mankind. In these doctrines there is much similarity caused by the spreading of established beliefs into new countries, and also much similarity that is beyond what such transmission can account for. So there is much variety due to local colour and circumstance, and also much variety beyond the reach of such explanation. The main causes of both similarity and variety seem to lie far deeper, in the very origin and inmost meaning of the doctrines. The details of the future life, among the lower races and upwards, are no heterogeneous mass of arbitrary fancies. Classified, they range themselves naturally round central ideas, in groups whose correspondence seems to indicate the special course of their development. Amongst the pictures into which this world has shaped its expectations of the next, two great conceptions are especially to be discerned. The one is that the future life is, as it were, a reflexion of this; in a new world, perhaps of dreamy beauty, perhaps of ghostly gloom, men are to retain their earthly forms and their earthly conditions, to have around them their earthly friends, to possess their earthly property, to carry on their earthly occupations. The other is that the future life is a compensation for this, where men’s conditions are re-allotted as the consequence, and especially as the reward or punishment, of their earthly life. The first of these two ideas we may call (with Captain Burton) the ‘continuance-theory,’ contrasting with it the second as the ‘retribution-theory.’ Separately or combined, these two doctrines are the keys of the subject, and by grouping typical examples under their two headings, it will be possible to survey systematically man’s most characteristic schemes of his life beyond the grave.

To the doctrine of Continuance belongs especially the savage view of the spirit-land, that it is as the dream-land where the souls of the living so often go to visit the souls of the dead. There the soul of the dead Karen, with the souls of his axe and cleaver, builds his house and cuts his rice; the shade of the Algonquin hunter hunts souls of beaver and elk, walking on the souls of his snow-shoes over the soul of the snow; the fur-wrapped Kamchadal drives his dog-sledge; the Zulu milks his cows and drives his cattle to kraal; South American tribes live on, whole or mutilated, healthy or sick, as they left this world, leading their old lives, and having their wives with them again, though indeed, as the Araucanians said, they have no more children, for they are but souls.^[180] Soul-land is dream-land in its shadowy unreal pictures, for which, nevertheless, material reality so plainly furnished the models, and it is dream-land also in its vivid idealization of the soberer thoughts and feelings of waking life.

Well might the Mohawk Indian describe the good land of paradise, as he had seen it in a dream. The shade of the Ojibwa follows a wide and beaten path that leads toward the West, he crosses a deep and rapid water, and reaching a country full of game and all things the Indian covets, he joins his kindred in their long lodge.^[181] So, on the southern continent, the Bolivian Yuracarés will go, all of them, to a future life where there will be plenty of hunting, and Brazilian forest-tribes will find a pleasant forest full of calabash-trees and game, where the souls of the dead will live happily in company.^[182] The Greenlanders hoped that their souls—pale, soft, disembodied forms which the living could not grasp—would lead a life better than that of earth, and never ceasing. It might be in heaven, reached by the rainbow, where the souls pitch their tents round the great lake rich in fish and fowl, the lake whose waters above the firmament overflowing make rain on earth, and if its banks broke, there would be another deluge. But gaining the most and best of their living from the depths of the sea, they were also apt to think the land of Torngarsuk to be below the sea or earth, and to be entered by the deep holes in the rocks. Perpetual summer is there, ever beauteous sunshine, and no night, good water and superfluity of birds and fish, seals and reindeer to be caught without difficulty, or found alive seething in a great kettle.^[183] In the Kimbunda country of South-West Africa, souls live on in ‘Kalunga,’ the world where it is day when it is night here; and with plenty of food and drink, and women to serve them, and hunting and dancing for pastime, they lead a life which seems a corrected edition of this.^[184] On comparison of these pictures of the future life with such as have expressed the longings of more cultured nations, there appear indeed different details, but the principle is ever the same—the idealization of earthly good. The Norseman’s ideal is sketched in the few broad touches which show him in Walhalla, where he and the other warriors without number ride forth arrayed each morning and hew each other on Odin’s plain, till the slain have been ‘chosen’ as in earthly battle, and meal-tide comes, and slayers and slain mount and ride home to feast on the everlasting boar, and drink mead and ale with the Æsir.^[185] To understand the Moslem’s mind, we must read the two chapters of the Koran where the Prophet describes the faithful in the garden of delights, reclining on their couches of gold and gems, served by children ever young, with bowls of liquor whose fumes will not rise into the drinkers’ heads, living among the thornless lotus-trees and date-palms loaded to the ground, feasting on the fruits they love and the meat of the rarest birds, with the houris near them with beautiful black eyes, like pearls in the shell, where no idle or wicked speech is heard, but only the words ‘Peace, Peace.’

With these descriptions of Paradise idealized on secular life, it is interesting to compare others which bear the impress of a priestly caste, devising a heaven after their manner. We can almost see the faces of the Jewish rabbis settling their opinions about the high schools in the firmament of heaven, where Rabbi Simeon ben Yochai and the great Rabbi Eliezer teach Law and Talmud as they taught when they were here below, and masters and learners go prosing on with the weary old disputations of cross question and crooked answer that pleased their souls on earth.^[187] Nor less suggestively do the Buddhist heavens reflect the minds of the ascetics who devised them. As in their thoughts sensual pleasure seemed poor and despicable in comparison with mystic inward joy, rising and rising till consciousness fades in trance, so, above their heavens of millions of years of mere divine happiness, they raised other ranges of heavens where sensual pain and pleasure cease, and enjoyment becomes intellectual, till at a higher grade even bodily form is gone, and after the last heaven of ‘Neither-consciousness-nor-unconsciousness’ there follows Nirwâna, as ecstasy passes into swoon.^[188]

But the doctrine of the continuance of the soul’s life has another and a gloomier side. There are conceptions of an abode of the dead characterized not so much by dreaminess as by ghostliness. The realm of shades, especially if it be a cavern underground, has seemed a dim and melancholy place to the dwellers in this ‘white world,’ as the Russian calls the land of the living. One description of the Hurons tells how the other world, with its hunting and fishing, its much-prized hatchets and robes and necklaces, is like this world, yet day and night the souls groan and lament.^[189] Thus the region of Mictlan, the subterranean land of Hades whither the general mass of the Mexican nation, high and low, expected to descend from the natural death-bed, was an abode looked forward to with resignation, but scarcely with cheerfulness. At the funeral the survivors were bidden not to mourn too much, the dead was reminded that he had passed and suffered the labours of this life, transitory as when one warms himself in the sun, and he 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.^[190] Among the Basutos, where the belief in a future life in Hades is general, some imagine in this underworld 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.^[191] 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 punishment: 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.’^[192] 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, 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.^[193] 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 (ἐς πλεόνων ἱκέσθαι; 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.

Where and what was Sheol, the dwelling of the ancient Jewish dead? Of late years the Biblical critic has no longer to depend on passages of the Old Testament for realizing its conception, so plainly is it connected with the seven-circled Irkalla of the Babylonian-Assyrian religion, the gloomy subterranean abode whence there is no return for man, though indeed the goddess Isthar passed through its seven gates, and came back to earth from her errand of saving all life from destruction. In the history of religions, few passages are more instructive than those in which the prophets of the Old Testament recognize the ancestral connexion of their own belief with the national religions of Babylon-Assyria, as united in the doctrine of a gloomy prison of ghosts, through whose gates Jew and Gentile alike must pass. Sheol (שאול from שאל) 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?’ 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:—

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, translating the Hades 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 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 (‘εἰς ᾅδου’ in the LXX., ‘èpesët èàmenti’ in the Coptic, ‘in infernum’ in the Vulgate). 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.’^[195] 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 indeed 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.^[196] Even among the higher savages, however, a connexion between man’s 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. Yet the grounds of good and evil in the future life are 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, we may with some distinctness define these as being excellence, valour, social rank, religious ordinance. On the whole, however, in the religions of the lower range of culture, unless where they may have been affected by contact with higher religions, the destiny of the man after death seems hardly to turn on judicial reward or punishment for his moral conduct in life. Such difference as is made between the future conditions of different classes of souls, seems more often to belong to a remarkable intermediate doctrine, standing between the earlier continuance-theory and the later retribution-theory. 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, so that earthly conditions carry on their contrasts into the changed world after death. Thus a man’s condition after death will be a result of, rather than a compensation or retribution for, his condition during life. A comparison of doctrines held at various stages of culture may justify a tentative speculation as to their actual sequence in history, favouring the opinion that through such an intermediate stage the doctrine of simple future existence was actually developed into the doctrine of future reward and punishment, a transition which for deep import to human life has scarcely its rival in the history of religion.

The effect of earthly rank on the future life, as looked at by the lower races, brings out this intermediate stage in bold relief. Mere transfer from one life to another makes chiefs and slaves here chiefs and slaves hereafter, and this natural doctrine is very usual. But there are cases in which earthly caste is exaggerated into utter difference in the life to come. The aerial paradise of Raiatea, with its fragrant ever-blooming flowers, its throngs of youths and girls all perfection, its luxurious feasts and merrymakings, were for the privileged orders of Areois and chiefs who could pay the priests their heavy charges, but hardly for the common populace. This idea reached its height in the Tonga islands, where aristocratic souls would pass to take their earthly rank and station in the island paradise of Bolotu, while plebeian souls, if indeed they existed, would die with the plebeian bodies they dwelt in.^[197] In Vancouver’s Island, the Ahts fancied Quawteaht’s calm sunny plenteous land in the sky as the resting-place of high chiefs, who live in one great house as the Creator’s guests, while the slain in battle have another to themselves. But otherwise all Indians of low degree go deep down under the earth to the land of Chay-her, with its poor houses and no salmon and small deer, and blankets so small and thin that when the dead are buried the friends often bury blankets with them, to send them to the world below with the departed soul.^[198] The expectation of royal dignity in the life after death, distinct from the fate of ordinary mortals, comes well into view among the Natchez of Louisiana, where the sun-descended royal family would in some way return to the Sun; thus also in the mightier empire of Peru, where each sun-descended Inca, feeling the approach of death, announced to his assembled vassals that he was called to heaven to rest with his father the Sun.^[199] But in the higher religions, the change in this respect from the doctrine of continuance to the doctrine of retribution is wonderful in its completeness. The story of that great lady who strengthened her hopes of future happiness by the assurance, ‘They will think twice before they refuse a person of my condition,’ is a mere jest to modern ears. Yet, like many other modern jest, it is only an archaism which in an older stage of culture had in it nothing ridiculous.

To the happy land of Torngarsuk the Great Spirit, says Cranz, only such Greenlanders came as have been valiant workers, for other ideas of virtue they have none; such as have done great deeds, taken many whales and seals, borne much hardship, been drowned at sea, or died in childbirth.^[200] Thus Charlevoix says of the Indians further south, that their claim to hunt after death on the prairies of eternal spring is to have been good hunters and warriors here. Lescarbot, speaking of the belief among the Indians of Virginia that after death the good will be at rest and the wicked in pain, remarks that their enemies are the wicked and themselves the good, so that in their opinion they are after death much at their ease, and principally when they have well defended their country and slain their enemies.^[201] So Jean de Lery said of the rude Tubinambas of Brazil, that they think the souls of such as have lived virtuously, that is to say, who have well avenged themselves and eaten many of their enemies, will go behind the great mountains and dance in beautiful gardens with the souls of their fathers, but the souls of the effeminate and worthless, who have not striven to defend their country, will go to Aygnan the Evil Spirit, to incessant torments.^[202] More characteristic and probably more genuinely native than most of these expectations, is that of the Caribs, that the braves of their nation should go after death to happy islands, where all good fruits grow wild, there to spend their time in dancing and feasting, and to have their enemies the Arawaks for slaves; but the cowards who feared to go to war should go to serve the Arawaks, dwelling in their waste and barren lands beyond the mountains.^[203]

The fate of warriors slain in battle is the subject of two singularly contrasted theories. We have elsewhere examined the deep-lying belief that if a man’s body be wounded or mutilated, his soul will arrive in the same state in the other world. Perhaps it is some such idea of the soul being injured with the body by a violent death, that leads the Mintira of the Malay Peninsula, though not believing in a future reward and punishment, to exclude from the happy paradise of ‘Fruit Island’ (Pulo Bua) the souls of such as die a bloody death, condemning them to dwell on ‘Red Land’ (Tana Mera), a desolate barren place, whence they must even go to the fortunate island to fetch their food.^[204] In North America, the idea is mentioned among the Hurons that the souls of the slain in war live in a band apart, neither they nor suicides being admitted to the spirit-villages of their tribe. A belief ascribed to certain Indians of California may be cited here, though less as a sample of real native doctrine than to illustrate that borrowing of Christian ideas which so often spoils such evidence for ethnological purposes. They held, it is said, that Niparaya, the Great Spirit, hates war, and will have no warriors in his paradise, but that his adversary Wac, shut up for rebellion in a great cave, takes thither to himself the slain in battle.^[205] On the other hand, the thought which shows out in such bold relief in the savage mind, that courage is virtue, and battle and bloodshed the hero’s noblest pursuit, leads naturally to a hope of glory for his soul when his body has been slain in fight. Such expectation was not strange in North America, to that Indian tribe, for instance, who talked of the Great Spirit walking in the moonlight on his island in Lake Superior, whither slain warriors will go to him to take their pleasure in the chace.^[206] The Nicaraguans declared that men who died in their houses went underground, but the slain in war went to serve the gods in the east, where the sun comes from. This corresponds in part with a remarkable threefold contrast of the future life among their Aztec kinsfolk. Mictlan, the Hades of the general dead, and Tlalocan, the Earthly Paradise, reached by certain special and acute ways of death, have been mentioned here already. But the souls of warriors slain in battle or sacrificed as captives, and of women who died in child-birth, were transported to the heavenly plains; there the heroes, peeping through the holes in their bucklers pierced by arrows in earthly fight, watched the Sun arise and saluted him with shout and clash of arms, and at noon the mothers received him with music and dance to escort him on his western way.^[207] In such wise, to the old Norseman, to die the ‘straw-death’ of sickness or old age was to go down into the dismal loathly house of Hela the Death-goddess; if the warrior’s fate on the field of battle were denied him, and death came to fetch him from a peaceful couch, yet at least he could have the scratch of the spear, Odin’s mark, and so contrive to go with a blood-stained soul to the glorious Walhalla. Surely then if ever, says a modern writer, the kingdom of heaven suffered violence, and the violent took it by force.^[208] Thence we follow the idea onward to the battle-fields of holy war, where the soldier earned with his blood the unfading crown of martyrdom, and Christian and Moslem were urged in mutual onset and upheld in agony by the glimpse of paradise opening to receive the slayer of the infidel.

Such ideas, current among the lower races as to the soul’s future happiness or misery, do not seem, setting aside some exceptional points, to be thoughts adopted or degraded from doctrines of cultured nations. They rather belong to the intellectual stratum in which they are found. If so, we must neither ignore nor exaggerate their standing in the lower ethics. ‘The good are good warriors and hunters,’ said a Pawnee chief; whereupon the author who mentions the saying remarks that this would also be the opinion of a wolf, if he could express it.^[209] Nevertheless, if experience has led societies of savage men to fix on certain qualities, such as courage, skill, and industry, as being virtues, then many moralists will say that such a theory is not only ethical, but lying at the very foundation of ethics. And if these savage societies further conclude that such virtues obtain their reward in another world as in this, then their theories of future happiness and misery, destined for what they call good and bad men, may be looked on in this sense as belonging to morality, though at no high stage of development. But many or most writers, when they mention morality, assume a narrower definition of it. This must be borne in mind in appreciating what is meant by the statements of several well-qualified ethnologists, who have, in more or less degree, denied a moral character to the future retribution as conceived in savage religion. Mr. Ellis, describing the Society Islanders, at least gives an explicit definition. When he tried to ascertain whether they connected a person’s condition in a future state with his disposition and conduct in this, he never could learn that they expected in the world of spirits any difference in the treatment of a kind, generous, peaceful man, and that of a cruel, parsimonious, quarrelsome one.^[210] This remark, it seems to me, applies to savage religion far and wide. Dr. Brinton, commenting on the native religions of America, draws his line in a somewhat different place. Nowhere, he says, was any well-defined doctrine that moral turpitude was judged and punished in the next world. No contrast is discoverable between a place of torments and a realm of joy; at the worst but a negative castigation awaited the liar, the coward, or the niggard.^[211] Professor J. G. Müller, in his ‘American Religions,’ yet more pointedly denies any ‘ethical meaning’ in the contrasts of the savage future life, and looks upon what he well calls its ‘light-side’ and ‘shadow-side’ not as recompensing earthly virtue and vice, but rather as carrying on earthly conditions in a new existence.^[212]

The idea that admission to the happier region depends on the performance of religious rites and the giving of offerings, seems scarcely known to the lowest savages. It is worth while, however, to notice some statements which seem to mark its appearance at the level of high savagery or low barbarism. Thus in the Society Islands, though the destiny of man’s spirit to the region of night or to elysium was irrespective of moral character, we hear of neglect of rites and offerings as being visited by the displeasure of deities.^[213] In Florida, the belief of the Sun-worshipping people of Achalaque was thus described: those who had lived well, and well served the Sun, and given many gifts to the poor in his honour, would be happy after death and be changed into stars, whereas the wicked would be carried to a destitute and wretched existence among mountain precipices, where fierce wild beasts have their dens.^[214] According to Bosman, the souls of Guinea negroes reaching the river of death must answer to the divine judge how they have lived; have they religiously observed the holy days dedicated to their god, have they abstained from all forbidden meats and kept their vows inviolate, they are wafted across to paradise; but if they have sinned against these laws they are plunged in the river and there drowned for ever.^[215] Such statements among peoples at these stages of culture are not frequent, and perhaps not very valid as accounts of original native doctrine. It is in the elaborate religious systems of more organized nations, in modern Brahmanism and Buddhism, and degraded forms of Christianity, that the special adaptation of the doctrine of retribution to the purposes of priestcraft and ceremonialism has become a commonplace of missionary reports.

It is well not to speak too positively on a subject so difficult and doubtful as this of the history of the belief in future retribution. Careful criticism of the evidence is above all necessary. For instance, we have to deal with several statements recorded among low races, explicitly assigning reward or punishment to men after death, according as they were good or bad in life. Here the first thing to be done is to clear up, if possible, the question whether the doctrine of retribution may have been borrowed from some more cultured neighbouring religion, as the very details often show to have been the case. Examples of direct adoption of foreign dogmas on this subject are not uncommon in the world. When among the Dayaks of Borneo it is said that a dead man becomes a spirit and lives in the jungle, or haunts the place of burial or burning, or when some distant mountain-top is pointed to as the abode of spirits of departed friends, it is hardly needful to question the originality of ideas so characteristically savage. But one of these Dayak tribes, burning the dead, says that ‘as the smoke of the funeral pile of a good man rises, the soul ascends with it to the sky, and that the smoke from the pile of a wicked man descends, and his soul with it is borne down to the earth, and through it to the regions below.’^[216] Did not this exceptional idea come into the Dayak’s mind by contact with Hinduism? In Orissa, again, Khond souls have to leap across the black unfathomable river to gain a footing on the slippery Leaping Rock, where Dinga Pennu, the judge of the dead, sits writing his register of all men’s daily lives and actions, sending virtuous souls to become blessed spirits, keeping back wicked ones and sending them to suffer their penalties in new births on earth.^[217] Here the striking myth of the leaping rock is perfectly savage, but the ideas of a judgment, moral retribution, and transmigration, may have come from the Hindus of the plains, as the accompanying notion of the written book unquestionably did. Dr. Mason is no doubt right in taking as the indigenous doctrine of the Karens their notion of an under-world where the ghosts of the dead live on as here, while he sets down to Hindu influence the idea of Tha-ma, the judge of the dead (the Hindu Yama), as allotting their fate according to their lives, sending those who have done deeds of merit to heaven, those who have done wickedness to hell, and keeping in Hades the neither good nor bad.^[218] How the theory of moral retribution may be superposed on more primitive doctrines of the future life, comes remarkably into view in Turanian religion. Among the Lapps, Jabme-Aimo, the subterranean ‘home of the dead’ below the earth, where the departed have their cattle and follow their livelihood like Lapps above, though they are richer, wiser, stronger folk, and also Saivo-Aimo, a yet happier ‘home of the gods,’ are conceptions thoroughly in the spirit of the lower culture. But in one account the subterranean abode becomes a place of transition, where the dead stay awhile, and then with bodies renewed are taken up to the Heaven-god, or if misdoers, are flung into the abyss. Castrén is evidently right in rejecting this doctrine as not native, but due to Catholic influence. So, at the end of the 16th Rune of the Finnish Kalewala, which tells of Wainamoinen’s visit to the dismal land of the dead, there is put into the hero’s mouth a second speech, warning the children of men to harm not the innocent, for sad payment is in Tuoni’s dwelling—the bed of evil-doers is there, with its glowing red-hot stones below and its canopy of snakes above. But the same critic condemns this moral ‘tag,’ as a later addition to the genuine heathen picture of Manala, the under-world of the dead.^[219] Nor did Christianity scorn to borrow details from the religions it abolished. The narrative of a mediæval visit to the other world would be incomplete without its description of the awful Bridge of Death; Acheron and Charon’s bark were restored to their places in Tartarus by the visionary and the poet; the wailing of sinful souls might be heard as they were hammered white-hot in Vulcan’s smithies; and the weighing of good and wicked souls, as we may see it figured on every Egyptian mummy-case, now passed into the charge of St. Paul and the Devil.^[220]

The foregoing considerations having been duly weighed, it remains to call attention to the final problem, at what state of religious history the full theological doctrine of judicial retribution and moral compensation in a future life may have arisen. It is hard, however, to define where this development takes place even at a barbaric stage of culture. Thus among the barbaric nations of West Africa, there appear such beliefs as that in Nuffi, that criminals who escape their punishment here will receive it in the other world; the division of the Yoruba under-world into an upper and a lower region for the righteous and wicked; the Kru doctrine that only the good will rejoin their ancestors in heaven; the Oji doctrine that only the good will dwell after death in the heavenly house or city of the Deity whom they call the ‘Highest.’^[221] How far is all this to be taken as native conception, and how far as due to ages of Christian and Moslem intercourse, to which at any rate few will scruple to refer the last case?

In the lower ranges of civilization, some of the most remarkable doctrines of this class are recorded in North America. Thus they appear in connexion with the fancy of a river or gulf to be passed by the departing soul on its way to the land of the dead, one of the most remarkable traits of the mythology of the world. This seems in its origin a nature-myth, connected probably with the Sun’s passage across the sea into Hades, and in many of its versions it appears as a mere episode of the soul’s journey without any moral sense attached to it. Brebeuf, the same early Jesuit missionary who says explicitly of the Hurons that there is no difference in their future life between the fate of the virtuous and the vicious, mentions also among them the tree-trunk that bridges the river of death; here the dead must cross, the dog that guards it attacks some souls, and they fall. Yet in other versions this myth has a moral sense attached to it, and the passage of the heaven-gulf becomes an ordeal to separate good and wicked. To take but one instance, there is Catlin’s account of the Choctaw souls journeying far westward, to whom the long slippery barkless pine-log, stretching from hill to hill, bridges over the deep and dreadful river; the good pass safely to a beauteous Indian paradise, the wicked fall into the abyss of waters, and go the dark hungry wretched land where they are henceforth to dwell.^[222] This and many similar beliefs current in the religions of the world, which need not be particularised here, seem best explained as originally nature-myths, afterwards adapted to a religious purpose. A different conception was recorded so early as 1623, by Captain John Smith among the Massachusetts, whose name is still borne by the New England district they once inhabited: They say, at first there was no king but Kiehtan, that dwelleth far westerly above the heavens, whither all good men go when they die, and have plenty of all things. The bad men go thither also and knock at the door, but he bids them go wander in endless want and misery, for they shall not stay there.^[223] Lastly, the Salish Indians of Oregon say that the good go to a happy hunting-ground of endless game, while the bad go to a place where there is eternal snow, hunger, and thirst, and are tantalised by the sight of game they cannot kill, and water they cannot drink.^[224] If, now, in looking at these records, the doubts which beset them can be put aside, and the accounts of the different fates assigned to the good and wicked can be accepted as belonging to genuine native American religion and if, moreover, it be considered that the goodness and wickedness for which men are to be thus rewarded and punished are moral qualities, however undeveloped in definition, this will amount to an admission that the doctrine of moral retribution at any rate appears within the range of savage theology. Such a view, however, by no means invalidates the view here put forward as to the historical development of the doctrine, but only goes to prove at how early a stage it may have begun to take place. The general mass of evidence still remains to show the savage doctrine of the future state, as originally involving no moral retribution, or arriving at this through transitional and rudimentary stages.

In strong contrast with the schemes of savage future existence, I need but set before the reader’s mind a salient point here and there in the doctrine of distinct and unquestionable moral retribution, as held in religions of the higher culture. The inner mystic doctrines of ancient Egypt may perhaps never be extracted now from the pictures and hieroglyphic formulas of the ‘Book of the Dead.’ But the ethnographer may satisfy himself of two important points as to the place which the Egyptian view of the future life occupies in the history of religion. On the one hand, the soul’s quitting and revisiting the corpse, the placing of the image in the tomb, the offering of meat and drink, the fearful journey to the regions of the departed, the renewed life like that on earth, with its houses to dwell in and fields to cultivate—all these are conceptions which connect the Egyptian religion with the religions of the ruder races of mankind. But on the other hand, the mixed ethical and ceremonial standard by which the dead are to be judged adapts these primitive and even savage thoughts to a higher social development, such as may be shown by fragments from that remarkable ‘negative confession’ which the dead must make before Osiris and the forty-two judges in Amenti. ‘O ye Lords of Truth! let me know you!... Rub ye away my faults. I have not privily done evil against mankind.... I have not told falsehoods in the tribunal of Truth.... I have not done any wicked thing. I have not made the labouring man do more than his task daily.... I have not calumniated the slave to his master.... I have not murdered.... I have not done fraud to men. I have not changed measures of the country. I have not injured the images of the gods. I have not taken scraps of the bandages of the dead. I have not committed adultery. I have not withheld milk from the mouths of sucklings. I have not hunted wild animals in the pasturages. I have not netted sacred birds.... I am pure! I am pure! I am pure!’^[225]

The Vedic hymns, again, tell of endless happiness for the good in heaven with the gods, and speak also of the deep pit where the liars, the lawless, they who give no sacrifice, will be cast.^[226] The rival theories of continuance and retribution are seen in instructive coexistence in classic Greece and Rome. What seems the older belief holds its ground in the realm of Hades; that dim region of bodiless, smoke-like ghosts remains the home of the undistinguished crowd in the μέσος βίος, the ‘middle life.’ Yet at the same time the judgment-seat of Minos and Rhadamanthos, the joys of Elysium for the just and good, fiery Tartarus echoing with the wail of the wicked, represent the newer doctrine of a moral retribution. The idea of purgatorial suffering, which hardly seems to have entered the minds of the lower races, expands in immense vigour in the great Aryan religions of Asia. In Brahmanism and Buddhism, the working out of good and evil actions into their necessary consequence of happiness and misery is the very key to the philosophy of life, whether life’s successive transmigrations be in animal, or human, or demon births on earth, or in luxurious heaven-palaces of gold and jewels, or in the agonizing hells where Oriental fancy riots in the hideous inventory of torture—caldrons of boiling oil and liquid fire; black dungeons and rivers of filth; vipers, and vultures, and cannibals; thorns, and spears, and red-hot pincers, and whips of flame. To the modern Hindu, it is true, ceremonial morality seems to take the upper hand, and the question of happiness or misery after death turns rather on ablutions and fasts, on sacrifices and gifts to brahmans, than on purity and beneficence of life. Buddhism in South East Asia, sadly degenerate from its once high estate, is apt to work out the doctrine of merit and demerit into debtor and creditor accounts kept in good and bad marks from day to day; to serve out so much tea in hot weather counts 1 to the merit-side, and putting a stop to one’s women scolding for a month counts 1 likewise, but this may be balanced by the offence of letting them keep the bowls and plates dirty for a day, which counts 1 the wrong way; and it appears that giving wood for two coffins, which count 30 marks each, and burying four bones, at 10 marks a-piece, would just be balanced by murdering a child, which counts 100 to the bad.^[227] It need hardly be said here that these two great religions of Asia must be judged rather in their records of long past ages, than in the lingering degeneration of their modern reality.

In the Khordah-Avesta, a document of the old Persian religion, the fate of good and wicked souls at death is pictured in a dialogue between Zarathustra (Zoroaster), and Ahura-Mazda and Anra-Mainyu (Ormuzd and Ahriman). Zarathustra asks,’Ahura-Mazda, Heavenly, Holiest, Creator of the corporeal world, Pure! When a pure man dies, where does his soul dwell during this night?’ Then answers Ahura-Mazda: ‘Near his head it sits down, reciting the Gâthâ Ustavaiti, praying happiness for itself; “Happiness be to the man who conduces to the happiness of each. May Ahura-Mazda create, ruling after his wish.”’ On this night the soul sees as much joyfulness as the whole living world possesses; and so the second and the third night. When the lapse of the third night turns itself to light, then the soul of the pure man goes forward, recollecting itself by the perfume of plants. A wind blows to meet it from the mid-day regions, a sweet-scented one, more sweet-scented than the other winds, and the soul of the pure man receives it—‘Whence blows this wind, the sweetest-scented which I ever have smelt with the nose?’ Then comes to meet him his own law (his rule of life) in the figure of a maiden beautiful, shining, with shining arms, powerful, well-grown, slender, large-bosomed, with praiseworthy body, noble, with brilliant face, one of fifteen years, as fair in her growth as the fairest creatures. Then to her speaks the soul of the pure man, asking, ‘What maiden art thou whom I have seen here as the fairest of maidens in body?’ She answers, ‘I am, O youth, thy good thoughts, words, and works, thy good law, the own law of thine own body. Thou hast made the pleasant yet pleasanter to me, the fair yet fairer, the desirable yet more desirable, the sitting in a high place sitting in a yet higher place.’ Then the soul of the pure man takes the first step and comes to the first paradise, the second and third step to the second and third paradise, the fourth step and arrives at the Eternal Lights. To the soul speaks a pure one deceased before, asking it, ‘How art thou, O pure deceased, come away from the fleshly dwellings, from the corporeal world hither to the invisible, from the perishable world hither to the imperishable. Hail! has it happened to thee long?’ ‘Then speaks Ahura-Mazda: “Ask not him whom thou askest, for he is come on the fearful way of trembling, the separation of body and soul. Bring him hither of the food, of the full fatness, that is the food for a youth who thinks, speaks, and does good, who is devoted to the good law after death—that is the food for a woman who especially thinks good, speaks good, does good, the following, obedient, pure after death.”’ And now Zarathustra asks, when a wicked one dies, where his soul dwells? He is told how, running about near the head, it utters the prayer, Ke maúm:—‘Which land shall I praise, whither shall I go praying, O Ahura-Mazda?’ In this night it sees as much unjoyfulness as the whole living world; and so the second and the third night, and it goes at dawn to the impure place, recollecting itself by the stench. An evil-smelling wind comes towards the dead from the north, and with it the ugly hateful maiden who is his own wicked deeds, and the soul takes the fourth step into the darkness without beginning, and a wicked soul asks how long—woe to thee!—art thou come? and the mocking Anra-Mainyu, answering in words like the words of Ahura-Mazda to the good, bids food to be brought—poison, and mixed with poison, for them who think and speak and do evil, and follow the wicked law. The Parsi of our own time, following in obscure tradition the ancient Zoroastrian faith, before he prays for forgiveness for all that he ought to have thought, and said, and done, and has not, for all that he ought not to have thought, and said, and done, and has, confesses thus his faith of the future life:—‘I am wholly without doubt in the existence of the good Mazadayaçnian faith, in the coming of the resurrection and the later body, in the stepping over the bridge Chinvat, in an invariable recompense of good deeds and their reward, and of bad deeds and their punishment.’^[228]