But though the tendency of ancestor worship is to run this course and to pass in this way out of the evolution of religion, it may be arrested at the very outset, if the religious spirit is, as it has been in one case at least, strong enough to stand against it at the beginning. Thus, amongst the Jews there {54} was a tendency to ancestor worship, as is shown by the fact of its prohibition. But it was stamped out; and it was stamped out so effectually that belief in the continued existence of the soul after death ceased for long to have any practical influence. "Generally speaking, the Hebrews regarded the grave as the final end of all sentient and intelligent existence, 'the land where all things are forgotten'" (Smith's _Dictionary of the Bible_, _s.v._ Sheol). "In death," the Psalmist says to the Lord, "there is no remembrance of thee: in Sheol who shall give thee thanks?" "Shall they that are deceased arise and praise thee? Shall thy loving-kindness be declared in the grave?" or "thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?" Thus the Sheol of the Old Testament remains to testify to the view taken of the state of the dead by a people amongst whom the worship of ancestors was arrested at the outset. Amongst such a people the dead are supposed simply to continue in the next world as they left this: "in Sheol the kings of the nations have their thrones, and the mighty their weapons of war," just as in Virgil the ghost of Deiphobus still shows the ghastly wounds by which he perished (Jevons, _History of Religion_, p. 301). {55}