But in Roman times the idea of peace in the celestial light was dominant among the Jews and Christians as among the pagans. Thus the Book of Enoch shows us the prophet carried off in a whirlwind to the heights whence he perceived “the beds where the just rest” amid the saints.[497] We can here point out exactly the most important of the literary intermediaries through whom this conception was transmitted from paganism to Judaism and from Judaism to Christianity. Towards the end of the first century A. D., amid the desolation which followed on the destruction of the Temple, a pious Jew, somewhere in the East, composed and ascribed to the venerable authorship of Esdras an apocalypse which enjoyed singular popularity until the time of its rejection by the Church as apocryphal. The visionary who set it down combines a number of pagan reminiscences with biblical ideas. He promises eternal felicity to the just, and asks himself what will be the lot of souls between the time of their death and the end of the world. Will they be at rest or will they be tortured? And the angel who inspires him answers that when the vital breath has left the body to go again to adore the glory of the Most High, the soul which has violated the divine law will not enter the celestial dwellings but will “wander amidst torments, for ever suffering and saddened on seven paths.” But the soul which has walked in the way of God “will rest in seven orders of rewards.”[498] The sixth of these is the order in which its face begins to shine like the sun and in which it becomes incorruptible, like the stars; the seventh is that in which it wins to the sight of God. These are conceptions and even expressions which belong to astral immortality, and the Jewish author, like the pagans before him, everywhere contrasts the state of agitation filled with anguish reserved for the guilty with the blessed tranquillity which is the reward of a pious life.[499] The description of the celestial dwelling which Saint Ambrose borrowed from the pseudo-Esdras is singularly like that given by the philosophers of the earlier period: a place in which there is no cloud, no thunder, no lightning, no violence of winds, neither darkness nor sunset, neither summer nor winter to vary the seasons, where no cold is met with, nor hail, nor rain. But the Christian doctor, like the Jewish visionary, adds a new feature: there will be no more sun nor moon nor stars; the light of God will shine alone.[500] The idea of repose in the eternal light was, thanks to the apocalypse of the supposed Esdras, to become one of those most frequently expressed by epitaphs and ritual. It was from this apocryphal work that the Roman liturgy borrowed the form of a prayer introduced into the office of the dead at least as early as the seventh century and still sung in the funeral service—_Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine et lux perpetua luceat eis_. “Lord, give them eternal rest and may perpetual light shine upon them.”