CHAPTER VII.
THE UNION OF GODS AND MEN.
The similitude of death with sleep is an idea of ancient date
and of wide distribution, which for many of mankind, whatever be
the creed professed, has mitigated the fears or lightened the uncertainties
which attach to the cessation of this life. Adopted by the
founder of the Christian religion as an illustration of the doctrine
that men 'shall rise again with their bodies,' the thought has
become a part of the heritage of Christendom, and in our own
language the word 'cemetery' bears testimony to it. But the idea
had been evolved by pagan thought long centuries before the
dawn of Christianity, and probably enough by the thinkers and
poets of many nations independently one of another. In the
oldest literature of Greece we meet with the thought already fully
developed and evidently familiar. 'To sleep an iron slumber[1]' is
already in Homeric language a simple and natural synonym for 'to
die'; and so too we are told that in the far off golden age men
'died as it were overborne by sleep[2].' And in yet plainer terms,
where Death and Sleep are personified, they are spoken of as twin
brethren[3], the children of Night[4]. This conception seems too to
have been a favourite in art[5], and provided one of the scenes on
the renowned chest of Cypselus[6].
When we turn to the folk-songs of the present day, we cannot of course hope to find the imagery of Death and Sleep pourtrayed as infants sleeping in the lap of Night, nor indeed, so far as I know, are they even described as brothers; for the personification of them by the modern peasants is rare. But the old resemblance
