n
befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so
dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that man hath no
pre-eminence above a beast" (Eccles. iii. 18, 19). "There is no work,
nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave" (Ibid, ix. 10).
"The grave cannot praise thee, death cannot celebrate thee: they that go
down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth. The living, the living, he
shall praise thee" (Is. xxxviii. 18, 19). In strict accordance with this
belief, that death was the end of man, the pre-captivity Jews regarded
wealth, strength, prosperity, and all earthly blessings, as the reward
of virtue. After the captivity they change their tone; in the
post-Babylonian Psalms life after death is distinctly spoken of: "My
flesh also shall rest in hope. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell"
(Ps. xvi. 9, 10); together with other passages. In the apocryphal Jewish
Scriptures the belief in immortality appears over and over again.

To say that Jesus "brought life and immortality to light through the
Gospel," even to the Jews, is to contend for a position against all
evidence. If from the Jews we turn to the Pagan thinkers, immortality is
proclaimed by them long before the Jews have dreamed about it. The
Egyptians, in their funeral ritual, went through the judgment of the
soul before Osiris: "The resurrection of the dead to a second life had
been a deep-rooted religious opinion among the Egyptians from the
earliest times" ("Egyptian Mythology," Sharpe, p. 52), and they appear to
have believed in a transmigration of souls through the lower animals,
and an ultimate return to the original body; to this end they preserved
the body as a mummy, so that the soul, on its return, might find its
original habitation still in existence: any who believe in the
resurrection of the body should clearly follow the example of the
ancient Egyptians. In later times, the more instructed Egyptians
believed in a spiritual resurrection only, but the mass of the people
clung to the idea of a bodily resurrection (Ibid, p. 54). "It is to the
later times of Egyptian history, perhaps to the five centuries
immediately before the Christian era, that the religious opinions
contained in the funeral papyri chiefly belong. The roll of papyrus
buried with the mummy often describes the funeral, and then goes on to
the return of the soul to the body, the resurrection, the various trials
and difficulties which the deceased