around the roots of these old beliefs that they are bound to decay?
The subject is an extremely interesting one.

A belief in some sort of an after-life is wide-spread. It is common
knowledge that the American Indians spoke of a happy hunting-ground in
the West, in which the soul of the warrior would rejoice in abundance
of game. Other peoples thought of the abode of the dead as in the East
where the sun arises. Still others taught that it was in the sun or
the other heavenly bodies, or underneath the earth in a subterranean
region. We are seldom able to determine the motives which led to these
varying locations.

All sorts of beliefs flourished in the Mediterranean basin a few
centuries before our era; but the drift of religious thought was moving
rapidly toward a passionate acceptance of another life somewhere in the
heavens. Immortality was taking on a more vivid coloring and was being
transformed from a passive survival to an event of marked religious
significance. New ethical motives were attaching themselves to an old
tendency and modifying it almost beyond recognition. The sentiments
and rituals built up around the ideas of sin and salvation were
reflected into the next world and created the vision of a heaven and
hell. What a rich field this was for the mythopeic imagination to
exploit! And what an interesting sociological fact is it that the
human imagination has always been more fertile in its descriptions of
hell than in its descriptions of paradise!

But a few words ought to be said about the earlier conceptions of an
after-life. Both the Greeks and the {140} Hebrews thought of the
other-world as a joyless reflection of the present. Death was, to all
intents, the end of what really counted. Those who deny that men can
live nobly without the hope of immortality forget that men like
Pericles were unaffected by that phantom dream. Even the great Hebrew
prophets extolled righteousness without the promise of a reward in the
next world. What men have done, we can surely do again. The Greek
father felt himself a member of a family whose traditions and loyalties
he wished to hand on intact. For himself, he desired only the
customary funeral rites so that his shade might rest in peace. In the
house of Hades dwell the senseless dead, the phantoms of men outworn.
The answer of Achilles to Ulysses, when that wanderer visits him in the
underworld, expresses this shadowy after-life admirably: "Nay, sp