From the most backward races historically known to us, to those of our own status, all have been more or less washed by the waters of this double stream of religion.  The Hebrews, as far as our information goes, were chiefly influenced by the first belief, the faith in the Eternal, and had comparatively slight interest in whatever posthumous fortunes might await individual souls.  Other civilised peoples, say the Greeks, extended the second, or animistic theory, into forms of beautiful fantasy, the material of art.  Yet both in Greece and Rome, as we learn from the ‘Republic’ (Books i. iii.) of Plato, and from the whole scope of the poem of Lucretius, and from the Painted Porch at Delphi, answering to the frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo, there existed, among the people, what was unknown to the Hebrews, an extreme anxiety about the posthumous fortunes and possible punishment of the individual soul.  A kind of pardoners and indulgence-sellers made a living out of that anxiety in Greece.  For the Greek pardoners, who testify to an interest in the future happiness of the soul not found in Israel, Mr. Jevons may be cited: 

’The agyrtes professed by means of his rites to purify men from the sins they had themselves committed ... and so to secure to those whom he purified an exemption from the evil lot in the next world which awaited those who were not initiated.’  ‘A magic mirror’ (crystal-gazing) ’was among his properties.’[11]

In Egypt a moral life did not suffice to secure immortal reward.  There was also required knowledge of the spells that baffle the demons who, in Amenti, as in the Red Indian and Polynesian Hades, lie in wait for souls.  That knowledge was contained in copies of the Book of the Dead—­the gagne-pain of priests and scribes.

Early Israel, having, as far as we know, a singular lack of interest in the future of the soul, was born to give himself up to developing, undisturbed, the theistic conception, the belief in a righteous Eternal.

Polytheism everywhere—­in Greece especially—­held of the animistic conception, with its freakish, corruptible deities.  Greek philosophy could hardly restore that Eternal for whom the Prophets battled in Israel; whom some of the lowest savages know and fear; whom the animistic theory or cult everywhere obscures with its crowd of hungry, cruel, interested, food-propitiated ghost-gods.  In the religion of our Lord and the Apostles the two currents of faith in one righteous God and care for the individual soul were purified and combined.  ’God is a Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.’  Man also is a spirit, and, as such, is in the hands of a God not to be propitiated by man’s sacrifice or monk’s ritual.  We know how this doctrine was again disturbed by the Animism, in effect, and by the sacrifice and ritual of the Mediaeval Church.  Too eager ‘to be all things to all men,’ the august and beneficent Mother of Christendom readmitted the earlier Animism in new forms of saint-worship, pilgrimage, and popular ceremonial—­things apart from, but commonly supposed to be substitutes for, righteousness of life and the selflessness enjoined in savage mysteries.  For the softness, no less than for the hardness of men’s hearts, these things were ordained:  such as masses for the beloved dead.