Pharisees have delivered to the people a great many observances by succession from their fathers, which are not written in the law of Moses; and for that reason it is that the Sadducees reject them, and say that we are to esteem those observances to be obligatory, which are in the written word, but are not to observe what are derived from the traditions of our fore-fathers." 18. The belief of classical antiquity as to the condition of souls after death, is beautifully summed up by Horace in the Ode (i. 10) to Mercury, date about b.c. 24; "Grateful alike to the gods supernal and infernal, it is thine to place pious souls in blissful abodes, and to coerce the airy crowd with thy golden wand." Homer, indeed, whose poems are certainly prior to the eighth century b.c., has no Elysian fields in the land of spirits; all is indeterminate, gloomy, uncomfortable. The shade of Achilles says: "Talk not of ruling in this dolorous gloom, Nor think vain words (he cried) can ease my doom; Rather I'd choose laboriously to bear A weight of woes and breathe the vital air, A slave to some poor hind that toils for bread, Than reign the sceptred monarch of the dead." But, whether from contact with the East and Egypt or otherwise, more definite conceptions of the abode of disembodied spirits were afterwards formed, which have found best expression in Virgil's Æneid, written about B.C. 20. There "The gates of hell are open night and day, Smooth the descent, and easy is the way;" just as in the sermon on the mount,--"Wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat." At a certain point hell is thus divided: "The right to Pluto's golden palace guides; The left to that unhappy region tends Which to the depths of Tartarus descends." So in the New Testament, the sheep (the saved) are on the right, the goats (the lost) on the left hand of the Son of man sitting on the throne of his glory. The region to the left is thus described: "These are the realms of unrelenting fate, And awful Rhadamanthus rules the state; He hears and judges each committed crime, Inquires into the manner, place, and time: The conscious wretch must all his acts reveal (Loth to confess, unable to conceal) From the first moment of his vital breath To his last hour of unrepenting death. Straight o'er the guilty wretch the Fury shakes The sounding whip, and brandishes her snakes, And the pale sinner, with her sisters, takes. All these within the dungeon's depth remain, Despairing pardon, and expecting pain." Far other the region to the right: