rned to haunt the living in their dreams, were widely
spread through the popular imaginations, and it was as the extinction of
all superstitious fears that the school of Lucretius and Pliny welcomed
the belief that all things ended with death--'Post mortem nihil est,
ipsaque mors nihil.' Nor is it by any means certain that even in the
school of Plato the thought of another life had a great and operative
influence on minds and characters. Death was chiefly represented as
rest; as the close of a banquet; as the universal law of nature which
befalls all living beings, though the immense majority encounter it at
an earlier period than man. It was thought of simply as
sleep--dreamless, undisturbed sleep--the final release from all the
sorrows, sufferings, anxieties, labours, and longings of life.

We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.[77]

The best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st
Thy death, which is no more.[78]

To die is landing on some silent shore
Where billows never break, nor tempests roar.[79]

It is a strange thing to observe to what a height not only of moral
excellence, but also of devotional fervour, men have arisen without any
assistance from the doctrine of a future life. Only the faintest and
most dubious glimmer of such a belief can be traced in the Psalms, in
which countless generations of Christians have found the fullest
expression of their devotional feelings, or in the Meditations of Marcus
Aurelius, which are perhaps the purest product of pagan piety.

As I have already said, I am endeavouring in this book to steer clear of
questions of contested theologies; but it is impossible to avoid
noticing the great changes that have been introduced into the conception
of death by some of the teaching which in different forms has grown up
under the name of Christianity, though much of it may be traced in germ
to earlier periods of human development. Death in itself was made
incomparably more terrible by the notion that it was not a law but a
punishment; that sufferings inconceivably greater than those of Earth
awaited the great masses of the human race beyond the grave; that an
event which was believed to have taken place ages before we were born,
or small frailties such as the best of us cannot escape, were sufficient
to bring men under this conde