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Rh stronger folk, and also Saivo-Aimo, a yet happier 'home of the gods,' are conceptions thoroughly in the spirit of the lower culture. But in one account the subterranean abode becomes a place of transition, where the dead stay awhile, and then with bodies renewed are taken up to the Heaven-god, or if misdoers, are flung into the abyss. Castrén is evidently right in rejecting this doctrine as not native, but due to Catholic influence. So, at the end of the 16th Rune of the Finnish Kalewala, which tells of Wainamoinen's visit to the dismal land of the dead, there is put into the hero's, mouth a second speech, warning the children of men to harm not the innocent, for sad payment is in Tuoni's dwelling — the bed of evil-doers is there, with its glowing red-hot stones below and its canopy of snakes above. But the same critic condemns this moral 'tag,' as a later addition to the genuine heathen picture of Manala, the under-world of the dead. Nor did Christianity scorn to borrow details from the religions it abolished. The narrative of a mediæval visit to the other world would be incomplete without its description of the awful Bridge of Death; Acheron and Charon's bark were restored to their places in Tartarus by the visionary and the poet; the wailing of sinful souls might be heard as they were hammered white-hot in Vulcan's smithies; and the weighing of good and wicked souls, as we may see it figured on every Egyptian mummy-case, now passed into the charge of St. Paul and the Devil.

The foregoing considerations having been duly weighed, it remains to call attention to the final problem, at what state of religious history the full theological doctrine of judicial retribution and moral compensation in a future life may have arisen. It is hard, however, to define where this development takes place even at a barbaric stage of culture. Thus among the barbaric nations of West Africa, there