History and tradition relate many interesting changes in human views respecting a future state of existence. The origin of belief in a realm of sorrow and suffering, anciently known as the nether regions, or sheol, is too remote to be distinctly traced, but it is clear that this belief was fixed in the thought of primitive peoples, who held that all humanity went to this region of despair after death and that punishment was there meted out in proportion to their shortcomings on earth. No hope of escape was offered.
Heaven, to be sure, existed in their thought also, but it was the exclusive realm of their gods, to which no being with human frailties could attain. In time, however, thought advanced to the belief that it was possible to experience such purification after death as would admit one to the realm of the gods, and later came the doctrine that by conspicuous service or heroism one might pass direct from the plane of mortal existence to the region of the blessed. Such direct transitions were held to be exceedingly rare, however, and possible only to those who had become so ennobled in the virtues which were then esteemed, as to render them equal to the gods with whom they were to associate.
Belief in sheol, or what later came to be known as hell, as a place beneath the surface of the earth, and of heaven as a locality above the earth's surface, was in part a product of the accepted teaching that the earth was flat. Light apparently came from above; hence a place of light and beauty must be upward. In the darkness and gloom beneath the earth's surface was the natural location for hell, according to the prevailing concept of it. Moreover, to primitive people the sky was a solid dome or wall in which the stars were fixed, and this dome or wall separated the region of earth inhabited by humanity from the realm of heaven inhabited by the gods. Absurd as they now seem, such beliefs were adhered to in those times as universally and tenaciously as the more modern beliefs respecting heaven and hell.
