the Vaitarani of the Brahmans; the Stygian stream of the Greeks; and the Jordan of the Christians, that flows between us and the Celestial City, "where the surges cease to roll." The sinking of the sun. below the horizon obviously led to belief in an under-world, whither the ghosts went. Barbaric notions are full of this, and the lower culture out of which their beliefs arose is evidenced in the Orcus of the Romans, the Hades of the Greeks, the Helheim of the Norsemen, the Sheol of the Hebrews, and the Amenti of the Egyptians, the solar features of which last are clearly traceable in their doctrine. Among the Hebrews, Sheol (translated, curiously enough, thirty-one times as "grave," and thirty-one times as "hell," in our Authorised Version) was a vast cavernous space in which the shades of good and bad alike wandered—" the small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master." It is akin in character to the Greek Hades, where they "wander mid shadows and shade, and wail by impassable streams." As ideas of a Divine rule of the world grew, its manifestations in justice were looked for, and the mystery of iniquity, the wicked "flourishing like a green bay tree," led to the conception of a future state, in which Lazarus and Dives would change places. Sheol thus became, on the one hand, a land of delight and repose for the faithful, and, on the other hand, one of punishment for the wicked.

Persian, and still older, influences had largely leavened Hebrew conceptions, and local conditions

in Judea added pungent elements. The Valley of Hinnom, or Gehenna, "the place where lie the corpses of those who have sinned against Jehovah, where their worm shall not die, neither their fire be quenched;" the dreary volcanic region around the Dead Sea, with its legend of doomed cities, supplied their imagery of hell with its lake of fire and brimstone. And, as the belief travelled westward, it fell into congenial soil. The sulphurous stench around Lacus Avernus, the smoke of Vesuvius, Stromboli, and Etna, wreathed themselves round the hell of Christianity and the under-world of barbaric myth; and from Talmudic writer to classic poet, to Dante and to Milton, the imagination exhausted the material of the horrible to describe the several tortures of the damned. The hell of our northern forefathers remained below the flat earth, but the cold, misty Niflheim melted away before the fiery perdition of Christian dogma. And, in the region bordering thereon, the limbus patrum, the limbus infantum, etc., we have the survival of belief in separate hells characteristic of the Oriental religions, and of the sub-divisions of the lower world in more rudimentary religions.

Beyond the narrow horizon which bounded the world of the ancients, lay the imaginary land of the immortals, the Blessed, the Happy, the Fortunate Isles. But as that horizon enlarged, the Elysian Fields and Banquet Halls were transferred to an upper sphere. In the wonder aroused by the firmament above, with its solid-looking vault across which

sun, stars, and clouds traversed; in the place it plays in dreams of barbarian and patriarch, when the sleeper is carried thither; in its brightness of noonday glory as contrasted with the dark sun-set under-world, we may find some of the materials of which the theory of an upper world, a heaven ("the heaved ") is made up. There the barbarian places his paradise to which the rainbow and the Milky Way are roads; there he meets his kindred, and lives where cold, disease, and age are not, but everlasting summer and summer fruits. There, too, for the conceptions of advanced races are drawn from the same sources, the civilised peoples of Europe and America have placed their heaven. And, save in refinement of detail incident to intellectual growth, there is nothing to choose between the earlier and the later; the same gross delights, the same earthborn ideas are there, whether we enter the Norseman's Valhalla, the Moslem's Paradise, or the Christian's New Jerusalem.

S XII.

CONCLUSIONS FROM THE FOREGOING.

It would exceed the limits and purport of this book to follow the extension of the belief in spirits to its extreme range; in other words, to belief in controlling spirits in inanimate objects, which were advanced pari passu with man's advancing concep

tions to place and rank as the higher gods of polytheism. Such belief, as already indicated, is the outcome of that primitive philosophy which invests the elements above and the earth beneath with departmental deities, until, through successive stages of dualism, the idea of a Supreme Deity is reached, and the approach is thus made towards a conception of the unity and unvarying order of nature. Deferring reference to the part played by dreams as media of communication between heaven and earth, and as warnings of coming events, let us summarise the evidence which has been gathered, and ask whether it warrants the conclusions drawn from it in the present work.

It has been shown that races have existed, and exist still, at so low a level that their scanty stock of words has to be supplemented by gestures, rendering converse in the dark next to impossible. Such people are bewildered by any effort to count beyond their fingers; they have no idea of the relation of things, or of their differences; they have no power of generalisation by which to merge the accidental in the essential. They believe that their names and likenesses are integral parts of themselves, and that they can be bewitched or harmed through them at the hands of any one who knows the one or has obtained the other. As an important result of their confusion between the objective and the subjective, we find a vivid and remarkable belief in the reality of their dreams. The events which make up these are explained only on the theory

that if the body did not move from its sleeping place, something related to it did, and that the people, both living and dead, who appeared in dream and vision, did in very presence come. The puzzle is solved by the theory of a second self which can leave the body and return to it. For the savage knows nothing of mind. The belief in this other self is strengthened (possibly more or less created) by its appearance in shadow or reflection, in mocking echo, in various diseases, especially fits, when the sufferer is torn by an indwelling foe, and writhes as if in his merciless grasp. The belief in such a ghostsoul, as to the form and ethereal nature of which all kinds of theories are started, is extended to animals and lifeless things, since like evidence of its existence is supplied by them. The fire that destroys his hut, the wind that blows it down, the lightning that darts from the clouds and strikes his fellow-man dead beside him, the rain-storm that floods his fields, the swollen river that sweeps away his store of foodthese and every other force manifest in nature add their weight to the inferences which rude man has drawn. The phenomena which have accounted for the vigour of life and the prostration of disease account for the motion of things in heaven above and the earth beneath, and the barbaric mind thus enlarges its belief in a twofold existence in man to a far-reaching doctrine of spirits everywhere. Step by step, from ghost-soul flitting round the wigwam to the great spirits indwelling in the powers of nature, the belief in supernatural beings with physical