Different influences had concurred to create this new conception of the hereafter and to secure for it by the end of the Greek period a wide acceptance. First, there was what has been called the subjective sense of fellowship with God. During this period of Israelite history there was engendered in select souls a passionate outreaching after divine companionship. This feeling is revealed in many a postexilic psalm, as where the psalmist exclaims, “For thou wilt not leave my soul to Sheol; neither wilt thou suffer thine holy one [beloved] to see corruption.”[421] This was the divination of love like that of the old mystic who exclaimed, “O God, if I should die, Thou couldst not live.”[422] It was such filial love and trust as this, which found its divinest expression in the life of “the Sublime Mystic of Galilee,” that created in many a devout soul in Israel that larger hope which gave birth to the doctrine of personal immortality. But while it was probably deep religious feeling, the soul’s recognition of its sonship to God, that called into existence the idea of personal immortality, it was the ethical necessity created by a profound faith in God’s absolute justice, an irrefragable conviction that under the moral government of the world well-doing will be rewarded and evildoing punished, that gained for the doctrine its wide acceptance. That good men should be afflicted and wicked men should enjoy prosperity, has in all ages of reflection caused questionings and murmurings. But this ethical problem filled with peculiar unrest the souls of the Israelites, first, because more than any other people they felt the need of a just God; and second, because of their lack of belief in a future life of rewards and punishments in which the wrongs and inequalities of this life might be righted. Hence the many different solutions of the problem which they thought out, and through which they sought to justify the ways of God to man. So long, however, as life practically ended at the grave, the problem remained insolvable. But the doctrine of another existence in which the righteous man should receive compensation for his sufferings here, and the evil man just retribution for his deeds, offered a reasonable solution of the problem that had so troubled the conscience of Israel. It was this undoubtedly that caused the teaching to gain popular currency. The doctrine, however, was not wholly the product of the religious and ethical development within Israel. Its growth was fostered by various outside influences. Among these was the Persian doctrine of the resurrection and a future life of retributive justice, with which the Jews became familiar at the time of the Exile in Babylon or later in the Persian period. Then again the development of the idea was stimulated, after the third century B.C., by Greek philosophy, particularly the Platonic.