If the sun-god was so natural a type of a man-like divinity, a god suffering some of the pains of humanity, a sort of type of man’s own ideal life here, it was natural that men should question this oracle concerning their future life and their hopes beyond the grave. We have seen that the Egyptians did so; seen how they watched the course of the day-star, and, beholding him sink behind the sandy desert, pictured a home of happiness beyond that waste, a place to be reached by the soul after many trials and long wandering in the dim Amenti-land which lay between. The Aryans dwelt, we believe, upon the slopes of the Hindoo-Koosh or in the level plain beneath; and, if the conjecture be reasonable that a great part of the land now a sandy desert was then filled by an inland sea,[90] many of them must have dwelt upon its borders and seen the sun plunge in its wave each evening. Then or afterwards they saw this, and interpreted what they saw in the very thought of Milton:-- ‘Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more, For Lycidas, your sorrow, is not dead, Sunk though he be beneath the watery floor. So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky.’ And thus a belief grew up among them that after death their souls would have to cross this ocean to some happy paradise which lay beyond in the ‘home of the sun.’ [Sidenote: Life in the tomb. The _double_.] But there is another idea, more simple and material than this, and therefore more natural to human nature in all its phases. This is the notion that the dead man abides in his tomb, that he comes to life in it after a certain fashion, and lives a new life there not greatly different from his life on earth, only calmer and more stately-- ‘Calm pleasures there abide, majestic pains.’ First of all, perhaps, the survivors are content to think of the dead man as simply living in his underground house. To prevent him coming out thence, the stone-age men, we noticed, scattered shards, flints, and pebbles, before the mouth of the house. To that tomb they brought their offerings of meat and drink. The notion of the soul is not yet separated from that of the body. But that does not show that all the ideas of those who confounded the two were purely materialistic. In common parlance we often confound spiritual and material things quite as much; and yet in our thoughts we have the power of separating them. We talk of a good-hearted man, and yet we can distinguish between the purely imaginary or spiritual entity here meant by ‘heart,’ and the mere physical organ. I do not say that early man could have distinguished between the idea of the dead body and the surviving soul. Probably he could not. I only say that we are not to judge of his belief merely by his rites and ceremonies.