soul in the philosophical sense
(see Harnack, _Dogmengeschichte_, Prolegomena, v. 4). For the first
Fathers of the Church themselves the immortality of the soul was not a
thing pertaining to the natural order; the teaching of the Divine
Scriptures, as Nimesius said, sufficed for its demonstration, and it
was, according to Lactantius, a gift--and as such gratuitous--of God.
But more of this later.

Christianity sprang, as we have said, from two great spiritual
streams--the Judaic and the Hellenic--each one of which had arrived on
its account, if not at a precise definition of, at any rate at a
definite yearning for, another life. Among the Jews faith in another
life was neither general nor clear; but they were led to it by faith in
a personal and living God, the formation of which faith comprises all
their spiritual history.

Jahwe, the Judaic God, began by being one god among many others--the
God of the people of Israel, revealed among the thunders of the tempest
on Mount Sinai. But he was so jealous that he demanded that worship
should be paid to him alone, and it was by way of monocultism that the
Jews arrived at monotheism. He was adored as a living force, not as a
metaphysical entity, and he was the god of battles. But this God of
social and martial origin, to whose genesis we shall have to return
later, became more inward and personal in the prophets, and in becoming
more inward and personal he thereby became more individual and more
universal. He is the Jahwe who, instead of loving Israel because Israel
is his son, takes Israel for a son because he loves him (Hosea xi. 1).
And faith in the personal God, in the Father of men, carries with it
faith in the eternalization of the individual man--a faith which had
already dawned in Pharisaism even before Christ.

Hellenic culture, on its side, ended by discovering death; and to
discover death is to discover the hunger of immortality. This longing
does not appear in the Homeric poems, which are not initial, but final,
in their character, marking not the start but the close of a
civilization. They indicate the transition from the old religion of
Nature, of Zeus, to the more spiritual religion of Apollo--of
redemption. But the popular and inward religion of the Eleusinian
mysteries, the worship of souls and ancestors, always persisted
underneath. "In so far as it is possible to speak of a Delphic theology,
among its more important elements must be counted the belief in