It is easy to endeavour to dismiss all this with cold indifference, or with a cheap sneer. But those who placed this book by the side of a departed relative had hearts that were still turned towards those they could never any more behold in the flesh. All their care and thought were not for themselves. And, too, they believed in right and truth, in justice and goodness. And because they believed in them, they believed also in a world and in a life of which those principles would be the law. CHAPTER XXV. WHY THE HEBREW SCRIPTURES IGNORE THE FUTURE LIFE. Veritas filia temporis.—BACON. It is impossible to become familiar with the monumental, and other, evidences of the position, which the idea of a future life held in the religious system, and in the minds and lives of the Egyptians, without finding one’s self again and again occupied with the inquiry—Why the Mosaic Dispensation rejected it?[5] To pass over a matter of this kind is to reject it. If a code makes no reference whatever to the idea of inheritance, but provides for the appropriation and distribution of the property of deceased persons in such a manner that the idea of inheritance does not at all enter into the arrangement, as, for instance, appropriating it all to the State, or distributing it all among the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, it is clear that the author of the code rejected the ordinary, and natural ideas of inheritance. In this way the Mosaic Dispensation rejects the idea of a future life, an idea which was the backbone of organized thought in Egypt, and among all Aryan people. It does not reject it in the sense of saying that it is false, but in the sense of omitting it as unsuitable for the purposes it has in view. It adjourns the consideration of it to another day, and to other conjunctures of circumstances. But this is only a part of the wonder. Solomon, one of whose wives was an Egyptian princess, and who possessed so inquiring a mind that it is absolutely impossible he could have been unacquainted with the idea, nowhere in what has survived of his ethical, philosophical, religious, poetical, or practical writings, thinks it worth even a passing reference. On the contrary, like his father David, he emphatically speaks of death as the end. The former had asked whether God shows His wonders among the dead? Or whether the dead shall rise up again and praise Him? Shall His loving kindness be showed in the grave, or His righteousness in the land where all things are forgotten? The wisdom of the latter promised length of these subsolar days only.