Forlong - Rivers of Life

Ancestor Worship.
family honour and rites of the cult—in Greece and Rome of the sacred Fire. As the
father hoped his remains would be watched over and honoured when he passed away,
he took care to see all the funeral fites and obsequies due to the dead, and
necessary, it was supposed, for their safe passage to bliss. Thus arose the doctrine
that a male child was necessary in every house, and woman but a God-given means
to that end. To be of male lineage, and so at once the head of the faith and the
clan, was the highest goal, and every man strove to be an Agnatus. It was in those
days that a clear idea of a personal immortality sprang up, and so became the inheritance
of Christianity—clearly, an inheritance from the East.
The belief of many thousands, indeed millions, of Europe, and probably of many
more in other parts of the globe is, that both our souls and bodies “rest in the grave till
the resurrection,” or until both rise together. This Virgil represents Eneas as meaning
when he attributes to him the words “Animamque sepulchro condimus;” and in this
case the placing of arms, etc., in graves has a logical meaning. Greeks, Latin, and
Christians, soon all vied in constructing for themselves a Heaven and Hell, and a
real bodily existence in some other land. They were all to know each other as now,
and go on very much the same, fighting, marrying and giving in marriage. Christianity
perhaps painted the after-life as more ethereal, but with “everlasting misery” for
nine hundred and ninety-nine in every thousand, and “everlasting bliss,” idleness and
singing, for the very select few. For those who believe in a bodily resurrection, it
would be worth while to weigh the necesssry facts of space, such as they can elaborate
for themselves by a little diligence. Herschel states that in a hundred generations one
pair of human beings would produce such a multitude, that if spread out over the surface
of the whole earth, and standing in rows of persons each four feet high, the height of
the column in three thousand years would reach to three thousand six hundred and
seventy-four times the distance between the sun and earth. 1 These arithmetical and
physical facts, however, never entered into the minds of the pious of those days, who resolved
all they could not understand into miracle or mystery, which it was blasphemous
to doubt. “One must have faith” was the cry then as now, but faith without reason is
blind, and to try and believe the unreasonable is a perversion of faith.
The ancient Greek—if we can frame an idea of his faith from his actions—believed
in a bodily resurrection, for he devoutly prayed for him who travels to the other world,
and heaped victuals and poured libations of good wine over his tomb to help him on
his way. Though Achilles at Troy had perished in the body yet he really lived; and
1 “For the benefit of those who discuss the subjects
of Population, War, Pestilence, Famine, &c., it
may be as well to mention that the number of human
beings living at the end of the hundredth generation,
commencing from a single pair, doubling at each
generation (say in thirty years), and allowing for
each man, woman, and child an average space of
four feet in height, and one foot square, would form
543
a vertical column, having for its base the whole
surface of the earth and sea spread out into a plain,
and for its height 3,674 times the sun’s distance
from the earth! The number of human strata
thus piled one on the other would amount to
460,790,000,000,000.”—Sir John Herschel, note to
an article “On Atoms” in the Fortnightly Review,
vol. i. p. 83.