in the grave” (Ibid, ix. 10).  “The grave cannot praise thee, death cannot celebrate thee:  they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth.  The living, the living, he shall praise thee” (Is. xxxviii. 18, 19).  In strict accordance with this belief, that death was the end of man, the pre-captivity Jews regarded wealth, strength, prosperity, and all earthly blessings, as the reward of virtue.  After the captivity they change their tone; in the post-Babylonian Psalms life after death is distinctly spoken of:  “My flesh also shall rest in hope.  For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell” (Ps. xvi. 9, 10); together with other passages.  In the apocryphal Jewish Scriptures the belief in immortality appears over and over again.

To say that Jesus “brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel,” even to the Jews, is to contend for a position against all evidence.  If from the Jews we turn to the Pagan thinkers, immortality is proclaimed by them long before the Jews have dreamed about it.  The Egyptians, in their funeral ritual, went through the judgment of the soul before Osiris:  “The resurrection of the dead to a second life had been a deep-rooted religious opinion among the Egyptians from the earliest times” ("Egyptian Mythology,” Sharpe, p. 52), and they appear to have believed in a transmigration of souls through the lower animals, and an ultimate return to the original body; to this end they preserved the body as a mummy, so that the soul, on its return, might find its original habitation still in existence:  any who believe in the resurrection of the body should clearly follow the example of the ancient Egyptians.  In later times, the more instructed Egyptians believed in a spiritual resurrection only, but the mass of the people clung to the idea of a bodily resurrection (Ibid, p. 54).  “It is to the later times of Egyptian history, perhaps to the five centuries immediately before the Christian era, that the religious opinions contained in the funeral papyri chiefly belong.  The roll of papyrus buried with the mummy often describes the funeral, and then goes on to the return of the soul to the body, the resurrection, the various trials and difficulties which the deceased will meet and overcome in the next world, and the garden of paradise in which he awaits the day of judgment, the trial on that day, and it then shows the punishment which would have awaited him if he had been found guilty” (Ibid, p. 64).  We have already seen that the immortality of the soul was taught by Plato (ante, p. 364).  The Hindus taught that happiness or misery hereafter depended upon the life here.  “If duty is performed, a good name will be obtained, as well as happiness, here and after death” ("Mahabharata,” xii., 6,538, in “Religious and Moral Sentiments from Indian Writers,” by J. Muir, p. 22).  The “Mahabharata” was written, or rather collected, in the second century before Christ.  “Poor King Rantideva bestowed water with a pure mind, and thence ascended to heaven....  King Nriga