Sometimes a new religious motive is more or less plainly apparent. Even the rude Fijian award depended in some way on the satisfaction of the gods. The Tonga Islanders were more explicit; neglect of the gods and failure to present due offerings would involve penalties hereafter. The sun-worshipping people of Achalaque in Florida placed men of good life and pious service and charity to the poor in the sky as stars, while the wicked languished in misery among mountain precipices and wild beasts. Two centuries ago Bosnian heard some of the negroes on the Guinea coast tell of a river in the heart of the land where they would be asked by the divine judge if they had duly kept the holy days, abstained from forbidden meats, and maintained their oaths inviolate, and those who could not answer rightly would be drowned. Such anticipations really introduce a fresh principle. Above the tribal morality, the custom of the clan, rises an obligation of no obvious and immediate use; even ritual practice, the observance of special seasons, or of proper taboos, the offering of prescribed {237} sacrifice, may create new standards of order in conformity with a higher will. They supply the groundwork on which the prophet may build the temple of the ideal. The ancient Semitic cultures formulated no general doctrine of immortality in the higher sense of the word. Faint traces of a hope of resurrection appear here and there in Babylonian texts; but there is no judgment beyond the grave; the chastisements of the gods arrive in this life; and it is only occasionally that the fellowship of heaven becomes the privilege of the great. In Israel the higher prophecy from Amos onward interprets "Yahweh's day" as a day of doom instead of victory; but the divine judgment would alight on the whole people, and would be realised in no future life but in some overwhelming national catastrophe. In Egypt the destiny of the dead was already individualised. Around it gathered the solemnities of the Osirian judgment-seat (p. 8); the ritual and the ethical demands of the forty-two assessors show the moral tests advancing through the ceremonial. The believer who passed safely through the ordeal of the balance and was duly fortified with the proper spells, was mystically identified with Osiris as the "justified," and different texts present different types of future bliss. He might find a home in the fields of Ialu, where numerous servants answered to his call, and he feasted on the magic corn. Or a fresh form might be {238} provided for him, when he was washed with pure water at the _meshken_ or place of new birth. Mysterious transformations assimilated him with various gods; or he was admitted on to the sun-bark among the worshippers of Rê, and fed on his words. But the guilty souls were subjected to unspeakable torments; there were magistrates to measure the duration of those appointed for extinction, and at the allotted time they were destroyed.