of more modern nations, had no representation of Death as an individual
agent. They expressed the extinction of life very naturally and simply
by the figure of a mummy. Such a figure it was their custom to pass
round among the guests at their feasts; and the Greeks and Romans
imitated them, with slight modifications, in the form of the image and
the manner of the ceremony. Some scholars have found in this custom a
deep moral and religious significance, akin to that which certainly
attached to the custom of placing a slave in the chariot of a Roman
conquering general to say to him at intervals, as his triumphal
procession moved with pomp and splendor through the swarming streets,
"Remember that thou art a man." But this is too subtile a conjecture.
The ceremony was but a silent way of saying, "Let us eat and drink, for
to-morrow we die," which, as Paul's solemn irony makes but too plain,
must be the philosophy of life to those who believe that the dead rise
not, which was the case with the Egyptians and the Greeks, and the
Hebrews also. An old French epitaph expresses to the full this
philosophy:--

"Ce que j'ai mangé,
Ce que j'ai bu,
Ce que j'ai dissipé,
Je l'ai maintenant avec moi.
Ce que j'ai laissé,
Je l'ai perdu,"

What I ate,
What I drank,
What I dissipated,
I have with me.
That which I left