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The Negroes have never yet, to this day, built a city or floated a ship. How then could they build the pyra- mids? Moreover, the religion of the Egyptians was similar to that of the Hindus in that both those peo- ples believed the human soul to be of divine origin; that this whole life is a warfare of good and evil. In short, the Egyptians are Indo-German. In that great migration from the cradle of the race in the far East they found a home at the delta of the Nile, where they have lived for at least eight and probably ten thousand years. Some of their kindred were migrating, per- haps at the same time, on parallel lines, farther north ; and the descendants of that northern stream are today (13) J. T. Clark's Ten Great Beligions, chapter on Brahman- ism. (14) Manu, 2:22 to 28. It is barely possible that the Western Ocean, mentioned above, may have been the Mediterranean Sea. A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 159 in Germany, in France, in England, and in the last four hundred years have crossed the Atlantic, and have only halted, in my own America, at the Golden Gate, on the shores of the distant Pacific. CHAPTER XIV The Doctrine of Immortality in Palestine and India. Section i. When Jesus was born, there were in Palestine, as we have seen, three religious sects; the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. Of these the Pharisees were the most numerous and aggressive. The origin of the sect is not surely known, but they were probably the descendants of the returned exiles (Benehaggola) from Babylon. They were certainly separatists; which their Hebrew name signifies (Phar- isee: to separate) ; and Ezra, when he returned from Babylon about 458 B. C, spent fifteen years in getting those Jews who had not been carried into exile, to "put away" the wives whom they had married from surrounding tribes. ( i ) But whatever their origin, the Pharisees, in Jesus' day, were greatly puffed up with pride and self-con- ceit. They affected uncommon sanctity, but their hypocrisy was so apparent that John the Baptist severely denounced both them and the Sadducees. (2) Their religion, if it was a religion, consisted in bloody sacrifices and useless ceremonies. Yet they (1) Ezra, ch. 10. (2) Matt. 3, V. 7. 160 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES i6i criticised Jesus (3) for eating with "publi- cans and sinners." They were so vain of pomp and parade that Jesus rebuked them, and told his follow- ers that when they went to give alms, to sound no trumpets before them in the streets and synagogues to have glory of men (4), as the hypocrites do. They have been called the slaves of lust, avarice and pride ; yet they believed in the immortality of the soul. "Under the earth," they said, "there will be rewards and punishments, according as one has, in this life, lived virtuously or viciously." (5) The wicked, they claimed, would be detained there in an everlasting prison. The souls of the good, they believed, would transmigrate into other bodies, and Hve on again in this world in a blissful state. (6) The Pharisees were full of inconsistencies and con- tradictions. They would not walk upon the grass on the Sabbath, lest some seeds might be shelled out, and that would be threshing. They made broad their phylacteries; but they laid grievous burdens on the people, and would not lift a finger to help them, and (3) Matt. 9:11. (4) Matt. 6, V. 2. (5) Jos., Antiq., Book 18, ch. 1, see. 3. We shall see further on in this chapter, that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul was a new importation among the Jews, from Zoroaster's teachings to the Persians ; or from Egypt ; or from India, Buddha's home. (6) The removing of Souls into other bodies (Book 2, Wars of Jews, eh. 8, see. 14) looks as if some one had heard from India, Egypt or Babylon. St. Paul (Acts 24:15) "hoped" that the just and unjust would all be resurrected. i62 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES they sought the best rooms at the feasts, and the chief places in the synagogues. (7) Luke justly told them they kept "the outside of the cup and platter clean, but left the inward part full of raving and wickedness." (8) Moreover, the Pharisees claimed that fate deter- mines all things, yet not sufficiently to take away free- dom of the will to act virtuously or viciously as one chooses. They stuck in the letter of the Law, and lost its Spirit; for if a flea bit one of them and he killed it on Sunday, that was hunting. Section 2. It is easy to determine why the Sad- ducees were a less numerous sect than the Pharisees; for the latter preached a hope for the soul beyond the grave. The Sadducees followed Epicurus (9), who taught that the soul "is only a finer species of body, spread through this frame, and that the death of the body is the end of everything." In short, the Sad- ducees said : "There is no resurrection, neither angel nor spirit." The Pharisees confessed both. (10) The Sadducees said there is no such thing as fate, but that each man is his own master; that the good which comes to him, and the evil which befalls him, are caused by his own wisdom or folly ; and they had scripture for their doctrine. (7) Matt. 23, V. 4 to 8. (8) Luke 11:39. (9) Epicurus, born in Samos, Greece, about 340 years B. C. His philosophy resembled Buddha's teaching somewhat, i. e., the mind should be composed and the body free from taint. (10) Acts 23, V. 8, and Matt. 22, v. 23. A QUESTION OF MIRACLES 163 They that plough iniquity and sow wickedness, they said, reap the same. He that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more; he shall return no more to his house. (11) The Sadducees were strict constructionists. They found in the Hebrew scriptures no certain and explicit mention of the immortality of the soul. They fol- lowed the letter of the law, and not finding the im- mortality doctrine taught there, they utterly rejected it. Having mentioned the Essenes in chapter XI. sec- tion 2, I will say no more of them here, but think I ought to state that quite a large number of both Phar- isees and Sadducees have survived the vicissitudes of time and country, and can be found, without much serious search, in many parts of America, England and Russia today. But they are as sheep without a shep- herd. Life, it is true, is an unsolvable mystery, and death is a still greater enigma; yet the doctrine of the im- mortality of the soul is old and moss-grown with age. Two thousand three hundred years before Jesus was born, the Egyptians had solved that mysterious prob- lem satisfactorily, at least to themselves (12), and had established a court to fix the future of the dead. Osiris and his triad were there to judge the departed, and Set and his devils were on hand to snatch the (11) Job 4:8; also Job 7, v. 9. (12) To be exact, Professor Lepsius fixes the date 2,380 years B. C, but M. Mariette goes back about 3,000 years B. C, and M. Chabas thinks 4,000 years elapsed before the first dynasty was formed in Egypt. That would be about 9,000 years ago. i64 A QUESTION OF MIRACLES wicked. The Egyptian doctrine had been in vogue about four hundred years when Abram "went up out of Egypt." (13) Yet no unequivocal mention and ap- proval of it appears in Jewish writings, until centuries after the Babylonian exile. Then it is first dimly dis- cerned in the apocrypha, and in Daniel. Section 3. Moreover, the doctrine of the soul's im- mortality was taught in India more than a thousand years B. C, and some think far beyond that limit. Buddha found it in the Upanishads (14) and for fifty years he preached it with vigor and success. He had evidently heard of the Moses fable about "seeing God face to face" (15), and when one day two Brahman students became engaged in a hot dis- pute as to which was the true faith leading to a state of union with Brahma, Buddha pursued the same method of reasoning that Socrates did a few years later in Athens. (16) Gotama asked Vasettha, one of (13) If Genesis, ch. 13, is right as to date, the journey of Abram was about 1,920 years B. C. Abram during his sojourn in Egypt must have learned of the belief in the immortality of the soul. But he makes no mention of it, nor does the Penta- teuch. It is probable that Moses did not believe in the immor- tality doctrine, else why his silence? (14) The Upanishads are the philosophical speculations of Hindu philosophers 800 to 1000 years B. C. about the soul or eelf, and they teach that the soul is immortal.