nd harming enemies, still rewards the right and sharply punishes the
wrong. That, then, was the kind of worship prevalent in the time of
Saul, and the gods were only the ancestors of the living. Well, this
may be admirable as science, but, as I summarized the long argument, I
felt as though something must give way.

Then we are told that our sacred book, the Old Testament, contains no
reference to the future life--rather ignores the notion, in fact. It
appears that, when Job wrote about the spirit that passed before him and
caused all the hair of his flesh to stand up, he meant an enemy, or a
goat, or something of that species. Moreover, when it is asserted that
Enoch "was not, for God took him," no reference is made to Enoch's
future existence. The whole of the thesis regarding the Shadow Land has
been built up little by little, just as our infinitely perfect bodily
organization has been gradually formed. It took at least thirty thousand
years to evolve the crystalline lens of the human eye, and it required
many thousands of years to evolve from the crude savagery of the early
Jews the elaborate theories of the modern Buddhists, Islamites, and
Christians.

Certainly this same evolution has much to answer for. I utterly fail to
see how a wish can give rise to a belief that comes before the wish is
framed in the mind. More than this, I know that, even when human beings
crave extinction most--when the prospect of eternal sleep is more than
sweet, when the bare thought of continued existence is a horror--the
belief in, or rather the knowledge of, immortality is still there, and
the wretch who would fain perish knows that he cannot.

As for the mathematically-minded thinkers, I must give them up. They
say, "Here are two objects of consciousness whose existence can be
verified; one we choose to call the body, the other we call the soul or
mind or spirit, or what you will. The soul may be called a 'function' of
the body, or the body may be called a 'function' of the soul--at any
rate, they vary together. The tiniest change in the body causes a
corresponding change in the soul. As the body alters from the days when
the little ducts begin to feed the bones with lime up to the days when
the bones are brittle and the muscles wither away, so does the soul
alter. The infant's soul is different from the boy's, the boy's from the
adolescent man's, the young man's from the middle-aged man's, and so on
to the end. Now, since every ch