ted
by some members of the community. Others will regard it as proof that
religion is naught; and yet others will be driven to seek for a form of
religion which affords no place for such deifications, but maintains
explicitly that distinction between a god and his worshippers which is
present in the most rudimentary forms of religion.

But though the tendency of ancestor worship is to run this course and
to pass in this way out of the evolution of religion, it may be
arrested at the very outset, if the religious spirit is, as it has been
in one case at least, strong enough to stand against it at the
beginning. Thus, amongst the Jews there {54} was a tendency to
ancestor worship, as is shown by the fact of its prohibition. But it
was stamped out; and it was stamped out so effectually that belief in
the continued existence of the soul after death ceased for long to have
any practical influence. "Generally speaking, the Hebrews regarded the
grave as the final end of all sentient and intelligent existence, 'the
land where all things are forgotten'" (Smith's _Dictionary of the
Bible_, _s.v._ Sheol). "In death," the Psalmist says to the Lord,
"there is no remembrance of thee: in Sheol who shall give thee thanks?"
"Shall they that are deceased arise and praise thee? Shall thy
loving-kindness be declared in the grave?" or "thy righteousness in the
land of forgetfulness?" Thus the Sheol of the Old Testament remains to
testify to the view taken of the state of the dead by a people amongst
whom the worship of ancestors was arrested at the outset. Amongst such
a people the dead are supposed simply to continue in the next world as
they left this: "in Sheol the kings of the nations have their thrones,
and the mighty their weapons of war," just as in Virgil the ghost of
Deiphobus still shows the ghastly wounds by which he perished (Jevons,
_History of Religion_, p. 301).

{55}

This continuation theory, the view that the dead continue in the next
world as they left this, means that, to the people who entertain it,
the dead are merely a memory. It is forbidden to think of them as
doing anything, as affecting the living in any way. They are conceived
as powerless to gratify the wishes of the living, or to thwart them.
Where the Lord God is a jealous God, religion cannot tolerate the idea
that any other spirit should be conceived as usurping His functions,
still less that such spirits should receive the offerings and the
pr