And then, among the poets who bridge over the period up to Plato, we find Pindar, who, alongside of reproductions of the ordinary, popular conceptions, gives us at times lofty, Orphic-like teachings as to the eternity, the migration, and the eventual persistent rest and happiness of the just Soul, and as to the suffering of the unjust one; Aeschylus, who primarily dwells upon the Gods’ judgment in this life, and who makes occasional allusions to the after-life which are partly still of the Homeric type; Sophocles, who indeed refers to the special privileges which, in the after-life, attend upon the souls that have here been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, and who causes Oedipus to be translated, whilst still alive, to Other-World happiness, but who knows nothing of an unceasing heightened consciousness for all men after death; and Euripides, who, showing plainly the influence of the Sophists, gives expression, alongside of Pantheistic identifications of the soul and of the aether, to every kind of misgiving and doubt as to any survival after death. And as to the appearance of the doctrine among the Jews, we again find a surprising lateness. I follow here, with but minor contributions and modifications from other writers and myself, the main conclusions of Dr. Charles’s standard _Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life_, London, 1899, whose close knowledge of the subject is unsurpassed, and who finds as many and as early attestations as are well-nigh findable by serious workers.[197] “The primitive beliefs of the individual Israelite regarding the future life, being derived from Ancestor-worship, were implicitly antagonistic to Yahwism, from its first proclamation by Moses.… This antagonism becomes explicit and results in the final triumph of Yahwism.” And to the early Israelite, even under Yahwism, “the religious unit was” not the individual but “the family or tribe.” Thus, even fully six centuries after Moses, “the message of the prophets of the eighth century,” Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, “is still directed to the nation, and the judgments they proclaim are collective punishment for collective guilt. It is not till late in the seventh century B.C. that the problem of individual retribution really emerged, and received its first solution in the teaching of Jeremiah.” And “the further development of these ideas,” by the teaching of Ezekiel and of some of the Psalms and Proverbs, as regards individual responsibility and retribution in this life, and by the deep misgivings and keen questionings of Job and Ecclesiastes, as to the adequacy of this teaching, “led inevitably to the conception of a blessed life beyond the grave.”