the darkness without beginning, and a wicked soul asks how long — woe to thee! — art thou come? and the mocking Anra-Mainyu, answering in words like the words of Ahura-Mazda to the good, bids food to be brought — poison, and mixed with poison, for them who think and speak and do evil, and follow the wicked law. The Parsi of our own time, following in obscure tradition the ancient Zoroastrian faith, before he prays for forgiveness for all that he ought to have thought, and said, and done, and has not, for all that he ought not to have thought, and said, and done, and has, confesses thus his faith of the future life: — 'I am wholly without doubt in the existence of the good Mazada-yaçian faith, in the coming of the resurrection and the later body, in the stepping over the bridge Chinvat, in an invariable recompense of good deeds and their reward, and of bad deeds and their punishment.'[1]
In Jewish theology, the doctrine of future retribution appears after the Babylonish captivity, not in ambiguous terms, but as the strongly-expressed and intensely-felt religious conviction it has since remained among the children of Israel. Not long afterward, it received the sanction of Christianity.
A broad survey of the doctrine of the Future Life among the various nations of the world shows at once how difficult and how important is a systematic theory of its development. Looked at ethnographically, the general relations of the lower to the higher culture as to the belief in future existence may be defined somewhat as follows: — If we draw a line dividing civilization at the junction of savagery and barbarism — about where the Carib and New Zealander ends and the Aztec or Tatar begins, we may see clearly the difference of prevalent doctrine on either side. On the savage side, the theory of hovering ghosts is strong, rebirth in human or animal bodies is often thought of, but above all there prevails the expectation of a new life, most
- ↑ Spiegel, 'Avesta,' ed. Bleek, vol. iii. pp. 136, 163; see vol. i. pp. xviii. 90, 141; vol. ii. p. 68.
