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

6. Zoroastrianism

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

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

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CHAPTER III

GRECO-ROMAN IDEAS

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

while admitting that they existed. We have largely to infer the primitive ideas from their vestigial nature taken in connection with their more definite existence and survival in uncivilized races.

1. Early Greek Ideas

There are two periods of interest in connection with early Greek ideas of religion and immortality. The first is the pre-Homeric and the second the Homeric, extending down to the time of philosophic reflection. We have to infer much of the pre-Homeric period from what we know of other nations and the general evolution of ideas. Homer and Hesiod were on the boundary line between two very different stages of culture and we can infer what they came from by the modifications of the ideas that prevailed with them and their contemporaries. They show us what the mythological period was and hence what the uneducated mind of that dark period before them must have believed. We describe the religious beliefs of that pre-Homeric age as mythology and mean by it that its conceptions were unreal, however real they may have been to those primitive people. It was a doctrine of polytheism in which there was a mixture of nature worship and deified heroes, the personification of the forces of nature and transformation of heroes into gods. These ideas seem to have gone hand in hand among other peoples as well, so that their relation here is not anomalous. The latter implied the immortality of the soul, and though there is no explicit evidence in philosophic and other writers of the extent to which a future life was believed there is evidence in the casual references to it, in the religious rites, funerary ceremonies, ancient epitaphs, and other sources to show that the common people never felt any skepticism about it. The various mysteries seem to have been connected with the belief,

though not as doctrines supporting it, but as rites by which one's path to the nether world was made easier. At least that is the opinion of many scholars.

How the Greeks came by their gods is not of importance to us here. It is their function in religious. and practical life that concerns the problems before us. As personifications of natural forces they were of primary interest to the practical life of the people. Agriculture, war, and trade were under the care of these divinities who had to bè propitiated if men were to be successful, and hence religion was the respect paid to powers capable of inflicting evil upon men. It was not to gain immortality that the gods were established, as in later Christian thought, but to purchase favors by obedience and service. Immortality was guaranteed, not by the gods, but by the nature of things and, though this was assured, the gods had something to do with the condition of those who passed the gates of death.

Their inevitable connection with some conception of a virtuous life easily involved them in the service of man wherever his happiness might be affected by their power. Some conception of a judgment in another world is indicated clearly in the stories of Minos and Rhadamanthus who were judges of the fate of those who passed the river of death. We shall later see Plato's account of it and can refer to it here only to suggest how general the belief in a future life was. It was so strongly rooted in the national life that even philosophy, except with the Epicureans, endeavored to sustain it, a course not so clear in the oriental philosophies as we have seen. At death Charon ferried the soul across the river Lethe and Minos and Rhadamanthus sat in judgment on those who thus entered Hades. A man's lot in that kingdom was according to his life on earth, the conception here being much the same as in Christianity, save that it is colored by