The belief in immortality is more prominent, though less intimately
bound up with religion, amongst uncivilised than it is amongst
civilised peoples. In early times the fancy luxuriates, unchecked, on
this as on other matters. It is late in the history of religion that
the immortality of the soul is found to be postulated alike by morality
and religion. The belief that the soul exists after death doubtless
manifested itself first in the {xi} fact that men dream of those who
have died. But, were there no desire to believe, it may be doubted
whether the belief would survive, or even originate. The belief
originates in desire, in longing for one loved and lost; and dreams are
not the cause of that desire, though they are one region in which it
manifests itself, or rather one mode of its manifestation. The desire
is for continued communion; and its gratification is found in a
spiritual communion. Such communion also is believed to unite
worshippers both with one another and with their God. Where death is
regarded as a disruption of communion between the living and the
departed, death is regarded as unnatural, as a violation of the
original design of things, which calls for explanation; and the
explanation is provided in myths which account for it by showing that
the origin of death was due to accident or mistake. At first, it is
felt that the mistake cannot be one without remedy: the deceased is
invited "to come to us again." If he does not return in his old body,
then he is believed to reappear in some new-born child. Or the
doctrine of rebirth may be satisfied by the belief that the soul is
reincarnated in animal form. This belief is specially likely to grow
up where totem ancestors are believed to manifest themselves in the
shape of some animal. Belief in such animal reincarnation has, in its
origin, however, no connection with any theory that transmigration from
a human to an animal form is a punishment. Up to this point in the
evolution of the belief in immortality, the belief in another world
than this does not show itself. Even when ancestor-worship begins to
grow up, the ancestors' field of operations is in this world, rather
than in the next. But the fact that their aid and protection can be
invoked by the community tends to elevate them to the level of the god
or gods of the community. This tendency, however, may be defeated, as
it was in Judaea, where the religious sentiment will not permit the
difference between God and man to be blurred. {xii} Where the fact
that the dead do not return establishes itself as incontrovertible, the
belief grows up that as the dead continue to exist, it is in another
world that their existence must continue. At first they are conceived
to continue to be as they are remembered to have been in this life.
Later the idea grows up that they are punished or rewarded there,
according as they have been bad or good here; according as they have or
have not in this life sought communion with the true God. This belief
thus differs entirely from the earlier belief, _e.g._ as it is found
amongst the Eskimo, that it is in this world the spirits of the
departed reappear, and that their continued existence is unaffected by
considerations of morality or religion. It is, however, not merely the
belief in the next world that may come to be sanctified by religion and
moralised. The belief in reincarnation in animal form may come to be
employed in the service of religion and morality, as it is in Buddhism.
There, however, what was originally the transmigration of souls was
transformed by Gotama into the transmigration of character; and the
very existence of the individual soul, whether before death or after,
was held to be an illusion and a deception. This tenet pushes the
doctrine of self-sacrifice, which is essential both to religion and to
morality, to an extreme which is fatal in logic to morality and
religion alike: communion between man and God--the indispensable
presupposition of both religion and morals--is impossible, if the very
existence of man is illusory. The message of the missionary will be
that by Christianity self-sacrifice is shown to be the condition of
morality, the essence of communion with God and the way to life eternal
. . . 34-69