11. In Genesis Adam was doomed to "return unto the ground, for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." He died when he had lived so many years, is the brief record of his death, and of that of all the other primeval patriarchs, with the single exception of Enoch, who "walked with God, and he was not, for God took him." The writer of the Hebrews states that he was translated that he should not see death. He is thus represented as escaping the curse of Adam, and as made immortal, contrary to the common doom. The statement in Genesis is so loose, however, that the exact meaning of the writer will ever remain uncertain. The deaths of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob are referred to thus: "that they gave up the ghost, full of years, and were gathered unto their people." They returned to the dust from whence they came, as their fathers before them. And when Joseph died, "being 110 years old," he is not "gathered unto his people," but "embalmed and put in a coffin in Egypt." 12. In Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the books that immediately concern Moses, there is no mention of any future state of existence. The precepts, the ritual, the rewards, and the punishments all have reference to the present life. Beyond the grave is nothingness: no hope, no fear. What a startling fact this is, and how intimately it concerns the subject now under consideration, appears when contrasted with the prevailing contemporary Egyptian belief. Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. They had been there upwards of two centuries. He himself was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. He had been brought up as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. Now, the most prominent belief of the Egyptian religion, as shown by the monuments and ritual, was the immortality of the soul and a state of existence beyond the grave, and it must have been vividly before the Israelites during their sojourn in Egypt. The god Osiris became incarnate on earth, worked all manner of good for mankind; was slain through the malignity of the evil one, the serpent Typhon, but rose again from the dead, and was made the 'judge of souls; the disembodied spirits were weighed in his balances; the just, after expiating their venial sins by many severe trials, in which they were accompanied and sustained by Osiris, who had himself passed through the same ordeal--"been tempted in all points like as they were"--shared the bliss of the god; the reprobate were condemned to lengthened torments, came back to earth as evil spirits, dwelt in the bodies of unclean animals, and were ultimately to be annihilated. In addition, also, to the symbolic idolatrous religion, by which the deity was represented to the people in numerous phases, all probably conceptions of natural phenomena, however incongruous most of the manifestations now appear, there was the hidden religion of the priests and of the initiated; and the main conception of this hidden religion