necromancer; 'And Samuel said to Saul, why hast thou disquieted me to bring me up?' Yet their quiet is contrasted in a tone of sadness with the life on earth; 'Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor widsom, in Sheol, whither thou goest.'[1] Such thoughts of the life of the shades below did not disappear when, in the later years of the Jewish nation, the great change in the doctrine of the future life passed in so large a measure over the Hebrew mind, their earlier thoughts of ghostly continuance giving place to the doctrines of resurrection and retribution. The ancient ideas have even held their place on into Christian thought, in pictures like that of the Limbus Patrum, the Hades where Christ descended to set free the patriarchs.
The Retribution-theory of the future life comprises in a general way the belief in different grades of future happiness, especially in different regions of the other world allotted to men according to their lives in this. This doctrine of retribution is, as we have already seen, far from universal among mankind, many races recognizing the idea of a spirit outliving the body, without considering the fate of this spirit to depend at all upon the conduct of the living man. The doctrine of retribution indeed hardly seems an original part of the doctrine of the future life. On the contrary, if we judge that men in a primitive state of culture arrived at the notion of a surviving spirit, and that some races, but by no means all, afterwards reached the further stage of recognizing a retribution for deeds done in the body, this theory will not, so far as I know, be discountenanced by facts.[2] Even among the higher savages, however, a con-
- ↑ Gen. xxxv. 29; xxv. 8; xxxvii. 35; Job xi. 8; Amos ix. 2; Psalm lxxxix. 48; Ezek. xxxi., xxxii.; Isaiah xiv. 9, xxxviii. 10-18; 1 Sam., xxviii. 15; Eccles. ix. 10. 'Records of the Past,' vol. i. pp. 141-9; Sayce 'Lectures on Hist. of Rel.' part ii.; Alger, 'Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life,' ch. viii.
- ↑ The doctrine of reversal, as in Kamchatka, where rich and poor will change places in the other world (Steller, pp. 269-72), is too exceptional in the lower culture to be generalized. See Steinhauser, 'Rel. des Negers,'
