pleasures were possible to
them.[7] This belief, it will be seen, differs from all the modern
doctrines of a continued existence. It is not the resurrection of the
body that the savage believes in. He knows well enough that the body
does not rise; but he also knows that the spirit can exist and move
and do a number of things that were done in life, without the body.
Nor can he be said to believe in the immortality of the soul. That
term describes a free and unfettered existence after death, but to
the savage the spirit after death has but a troubled and frail
existence; it is tethered to certain spots on the earth, known to it
formerly; it cannot do much, it lives under many limitations and
constraints. Nor, again, can it be said that retribution after death
is a true designation of the early belief. That may be found here and
there in early times, but generally the other life is less under a
divine government than this one; death takes a man away from his god
as well as from his family, and the dead are left to themselves.

[Footnote 7: On this subject compare Mr. Tylor's _Primitive Culture_,
twelfth and thirteenth chapters.]

While, however, this is the general background of primitive belief
about the other life, imagination is at work on the subject very
early, and various features of that life are touched with more vivid
colours, here in one way and there in another. The place where the
departed stay, their occupations, their delights, are variously
described; the land where they dwell is modelled on a land that is
known, with the addition of ideal features; they do very much what
they did on earth, hunt or feast, make music or carry on discussions.
In some cases there is a judgment-seat before which the soul appears
for its trial, and here of course the spirit-world must be divided
into two parts or more, for the reception of those who are approved
and of those who are condemned. The detailed description of the
abodes of the blest and of the damned, by no means peculiar to
Christianity, are later developments in the early world. Hell, Mr.
Tylor says, is unknown to savage thought. The doctrine of
transmigration, however, whether into plants or into lower animals,
is of early growth.

Growth of the Great Religions out of these Beliefs.--These various
developments of thought about the gods did, as a matter of fact, take
place in primitive times, and that is almost all that can be said. In
the religion of savages t