loved, hated; and yet all the time their limbs were quiet.  What could it be that forced the slumbering man to believe himself to be in full activity?  It must be some invisible essence independent of the bones and muscles.  Therefore when a man died it followed that the body which was buried must have parted permanently from the mystic “something” that caused dreams.  That mystic “something” therefore lived on after the death of the body.  The bodily organs were mere accidental encumbrances; the real “man” was the viewless creature that had the visions of the night.  The body might go; but the thing which by and by was named “soul” was imperishable.

I can see the drift of foggy argument.  The writer means to say that the belief in immortality sprang up because the wish was father to the thought.  Men longed to live, and thus they persuaded themselves that they would live; and, one refinement after another having been added to the vague-minded savage’s animal yearning, we have the elaborate system of theology and the reverential faith that guide the lives of civilized human entities.  Very pretty!  Then the literary critic steps in and shows how the belief in immortality has been enlarged and elaborated since the days of Saul, the son of Kish.  When the witch of Endor saw gods ascending from the earth, she was only anticipating the experience of sorcerers who ply their trade in the islands of the Pacific.  Professor Huxley admires the awful description of Saul’s meeting with the witch; but the Professor shows that the South Sea islanders also see gods ascending out of the earth, and he thinks that the Eastern natives in Saul’s day encouraged a form of ancestor-worship.  The literary critic says ancestor-worship is one of the great branches of the religion of mankind.  Its principles are not difficult to understand, for they plainly keep up the social relations of the living world.  The dead ancestor, now passed into a deity, goes on protecting his family and receiving suit and service from them as of old.  The dead chief still watches over his own tribe, still holds his authority by helping friends and harming enemies, still rewards the right and sharply punishes the wrong.  That, then, was the kind of worship prevalent in the time of Saul, and the gods were only the ancestors of the living.  Well, this may be admirable as science, but, as I summarized the long argument, I felt as though something must give way.

Then we are told that our sacred book, the Old Testament, contains no reference to the future life—­rather ignores the notion, in fact.  It appears that, when Job wrote about the spirit that passed before him and caused all the hair of his flesh to stand up, he meant an enemy, or a goat, or something of that species.  Moreover, when it is asserted that Enoch “was not, for God took him,” no reference is made to Enoch’s future existence.  The whole of the thesis regarding the Shadow Land has been built up little by little, just as our infinitely perfect bodily organization has been gradually formed.  It took at least thirty thousand years to evolve the crystalline lens of the human eye, and it required many thousands of years to evolve from the crude savagery of the early Jews the elaborate theories of the modern Buddhists, Islamites, and Christians.