It has been asserted repeatedly that the idea of a future life was not a part of the Jewish religion, as formulated in the Bible. Haeckel has recently repeated a common opinion that belief in the immortality of the soul was absent from the oldest and purest form of the Jewish religion. “There is not to be found,” he said, “either in the Pentateuch or in those more ancient parts of the Old Testament which were written before the Babylonian captivity, any idea of the persistence of the human soul.” This is true only within limits. No doubt the books of Moses contain no reference to a future life nor to heaven and hell in the sense of modern creeds, but it is no less true that the ancient Jews shared with other races the conception of a survival after death. “Like almost all primitive nations,” wrote Renan,[166] “the Hebrews believed in a kind of double personality, in a shadow pale and thin which, after death, descended underground and passed a sad and colourless existence in the sombre halls of the dead. The dead dwelt there, without feeling, or knowledge, or memory, in a world without light, abandoned by God. At the most the old Hebrews hoped to obtain for themselves a quiet resting-place, a pleasant couch for the time when they would be with the dead. It comforted them to picture themselves as lying amongst their ancestors in quiet communion.” Ancestor-worship, which is associated closely with the idea of a future life, appears repeatedly in the Pentateuch. Jacob, when he felt death coming upon him, called his son Joseph and said unto him, “Bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt; but I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their burying-place.” According to Chantepie de la Saussaye,[167] “we are coming to recognise more and more how strongly the children of Israel, and in fact all other peoples, were tinged with animism and ancestor-worship.” It is very remarkable how the idea of a future life, which was vague in the early days of Israel, grew more and more clear. Ezekiel (sixth century B.C.), when he had “seen the visions of God,” prophesied of things to come, and declared that God would breathe life into the dry bones of the dead. The Book of Daniel (second century B.C.) expressed the same idea in a stronger fashion: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel xii. 2). “It is plain,” said Renan,[168] after quoting these words, “that Israel had now reached the last stage in the secular development of her ideas, and had reached the conception of the kingdom of God, as synonymous with the future world and the resurrection. As the conception of a soul distinct from the body was foreign to her, she could not conceive of a future life apart from resurrection of the body.”