16. Yet there are a few verses of the Old Testament, the principal Job xix. 25-27; Isaiah xxvi. 19; Ezek. xxxvii. 12, 13; Daniel xii. 2, that, as translated in the authorised version, seem to express the hope of a bodily resurrection. All these passages are of a highly poetical character (that of Daniel is in connection with the great Jewish prince Michael), and if read in the light of the explicit declarations just quoted, it will be felt that they must be open to other constructions, and probably to other renderings than those in the present translation. But it is no part of the present purpose to reconcile discrepancies, apparent or real; and in any case, it is clear that even these last-named passages do not countenance such conceptions as the heaven and hell of the New Testament. The Christian clergy, fully alive to the importance, for upholding the divine origin which they claim for their creed, of making New Testament ideas a development and fulfilment of the Old, and of showing that the deities, Mosaic and Christian, are the same, and not contradictory, have displayed much ingenuity in reconciling incongruities and in discovering resemblances in ways and by reasonings that would not have occurred to ordinary truth-seeking men; but no unbiassed inquirer can fail to perceive the utter divergence between the Old and New Testament doctrine and practice, as regards a future life, and how impossible it is that both sets of ideas can have emanated from the same mind or spirit, mortal or immortal. There are thus only three possible conclusions: (1.) The Mosaic deity is the true God, not the Christian; (2.) the Christian deity is the true God, not the Mosaic; but this contradicts the Christian deity himself, who says the Mosaic deity was himself; or, (3.) neither is God, in which case there has been no revelation, and all that is left for men is either to assume the existence and attributes of a God who has never revealed himself, or to disbelieve in such existence; or to acknowledge that the question of the existence of a God is one beyond the reach of the human faculties to determine.
17. If then the resurrection of Jesus and the New Testament declarations as to a future life, are thus wholly opposed to Old Testament ideas, do they present any resemblance to the belief of heathendom?
(a.) The faith and practice of the Egyptians, in connection with their god Osiris, have already been referred to in preceding paragraph 12. It has been well said that the ancient Egyptians, in their vivid anticipations of the life to come, lived rather in the next world than on the banks of the Nile. The bodily resurrection also had a place in their system. The belief in the deathlessness of souls has been a marked characteristic of all the Turanian races, whether represented, as many hold, by the Egyptians, Etruscans, and Lydians of aid, or by the Chinese, Mongols, and Finns of the present day. The Etruscan sepulchral paintings represent the disembodied souls on their way to the land of spirits. Some are calm and resigned, with rods in their hands: some full of horror and dismay: attendant spirits, good and evil, contend for their possession; the good spirits are coloured red, the evil spirits black; the heads of the latter are wreathed with serpents, and they bear in their hands a hammer or mallet, which is sometimes raised as in the act of striking the woe-begone soul on the knee vainly imploring mercy, (b.) In the Zend-a-Vesta,—the ancient Persian Scriptures,—a narrow passage, called "the bridge of the gatherer," is said to be extended over the middle of hell, where the souls of the dead are assembled on the day after the third night from their decease. The wicked fall into the gulf beneath, the gloomy kingdom of Ahriman, and are doomed to feed upon poisoned food. The good, sustained by benign angels and spirits and the prayers of surviving friends, cross over in safety, and are greeted on the other side by the archangel, as having passed from mortality to immortality. Thence they rise to paradise, where Ormuzd and his six holy ones sit on golden thrones, and at once join in the conflict against Ahriman and the powers of darkness. At the last day they will share the glory of the triumph of Ormuzd, when Ahriman and his angels, finally routed and overcome, will be driven into their native darkness, and virtue, harmony, and bliss will evermore prevail in the universe. The resurrection of the body is also contained in the Zend-a-Vesta, and it likewise forms part of the creed of the Magi. (c.) Of the sects into which the Jews were divided after the return from the captivity in Babylon, the writer of the Acts states: "For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, neither angel, nor spirit; but the Pharisees confess both:" and Josephus writes concerning the latter, "They believe that souls have an immortal vigour in them, and that under the earth there will be rewards or punishments, according as they have lived virtuously or viciously in this life; and the latter are to be detained in an everlasting prison, but that the former shall have power to revive, and live again." Elsewhere he shows that these beliefs were traditional merely: "What I would now explain is this, that the Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the law of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them, and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory, which are in the written word, but are not to observe what are derived from the traditions of our fore-fathers."
18. The belief of classical antiquity as to the condition of souls after death, is beautifully summed up by Horace in the Ode (i. 10) to Mercury, date about b.c. 24; "Grateful alike to the gods supernal and infernal, it is thine to place pious souls in blissful abodes, and to coerce the airy crowd with thy golden wand." Homer, indeed, whose poems are certainly prior to the eighth century b.c., has no Elysian fields in the land of spirits; all is indeterminate, gloomy, uncomfortable. The shade of Achilles says:
"Talk not of ruling in this dolorous gloom,
Nor think vain words (he cried) can ease my doom;
Rather I'd choose laboriously to bear
A weight of woes and breathe the vital air,
A slave to some poor hind that toils for bread,
Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead."
But, whether from contact with the East and Egypt or otherwise, more definite conceptions of the abode of disembodied spirits were afterwards formed, which have found best expression in Virgil's Æneid, written about B.C. 20. There
"The gates of hell are open night and day,
Smooth the descent, and easy is the way;"
just as in the sermon on the mount,—"Wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat."
At a certain point hell is thus divided:
"The right to Pluto's golden palace guides;
The left to that unhappy region tends
Which to the depths of Tartarus descends."