The theory of _do ut des_ is expressed with naïve completeness in a Brahmanic hymn. “Well filled, O spoon [of the sacrifice], fly down; well filled, return. As having agreed on a price, let us make exchanges of strength and vigour. Give me, I give to thee; bring to me, I bring to thee.” Better still: "If thou wilt injure any one, say to Surya: ‘Strike such an one, and I will make thee an offering,’ and Surya, to obtain the offering, will strike him." (Barth, _Les Religions de l’Inde_, pp. 25, 26.) ----- For most religions, the supreme question is that of human destiny. Its history, having traversed two periods, the one naturalistic, the other moral, shows once more that the religious and the moral sentiment are, in their origin, two totally distinct feelings. During the first period, we find no idea of retribution according to men’s works. The life after death is a continuation or copy of the earthly life, sometimes resembling it exactly, sometimes better,—most often worse. We know the complaint of Achilles, in the _Odyssey_ (xi), where Homer has left us a vivid picture of this primitive belief; men remain slaves, masters, chiefs, or kings, as they were during life. Nay, certain tribes, projecting their aristocratic prejudices into the other world, believed that the souls of chiefs alone were immortal. During the second period there arises a belief in a preliminary judgment on men’s actions, decisive of their future destiny. The conceptions of this future life are various: temporary or eternal penalties and rewards, transmigration upwards or downwards, total liberation (_Nirvana_), etc., but all resting on a moral idea. This notion appears at an early age among the Egyptians, in the judgment of Osiris and the weighing of the souls. In the “Book of the Dead,” of which a copy was placed in the tomb with every mummy, the defunct addresses to the god a long enumeration of the good deeds he has done and the faults he has not committed; it is remarkable that he speaks, not of his oblations, but of his virtues.[197] ----- Footnote 197: This prayer will be found in full in Maspero, _op. cit._ (4th ed.), p. 38. ----- III. At the point we have reached, the religious feeling has attained the height of its development, and can henceforth only decline, so that the third period need not detain us long. It may be summed up in the following formula: an ever-growing predominance of the intellectual (rational) element, a gradual effacement of the emotional element as it tends to approximate to the intellectual feelings and to come under that category.