But this life might be conceived in an infinite variety ol forms. Where was it passed? under what conditions? what would be its privileges and its requirements? how long would it last? To these and a hundred other questions no uniform answers have been returned; and numerous as are the stories of visits to the other world, there is little agreement as to its place, its scenery, its occupations, its society, its government, its duties, its punishments, or its rewards. Yet no field of human imagination reflects more clearly the stage of social and moral development which creates it. Into his pictures of the future man has persistently woven his {227} criticism of the present. But the tenacity of usage and convention in everything affecting the dead has sometimes detained belief at a much lower level than the general progress of ethical feeling might otherwise have suggested. Religious thought does not always move forwards with equal speed over all the relations and possibilities of life. The logic of the treatment of the dead is full of gaps and inconsistencies. The same people will perform rites which rest upon quite different theories; customs have run together in strange incoherence. This may be sometimes due to the necessity for making provision for different elements in the person which were united while on earth. The wealthy Egyptian required an elaborate home in the tomb for his double or _ka_, while his _ba_ started on its perilous journey through the mysterious regions of the world of the dead. From the ethical point of view, however, which chiefly concerns the student of comparative religion, the doctrine of the next life falls into two main divisions, as Burton and Tylor pointed out more than a generation ago--theories of continuance, and theories of retribution. They are connected by many intermediate stages of transition, and they range all the way from the crudest conceptions of prolonged existence in the grave, up to exalted solemnities of judgment, of doom, and of the fellowship of heaven.