764 ECCLESIASTICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



Being possessed by a common sentiment towards the dead, 

 and in so far made to sympathize, those who have been at 

 enmity have their animosities to some extent mitigated ; and 

 not uncommonly reconciliations are effected. So that beyond 

 a strengthening of the family-group by the gathering 

 together of its members, there is a strengthening of it caused 

 by the healing of breaches. 



One more co-operative influence exists. The injunctions 

 of the deceased are made known ; and when these have 

 reference to family-differences, obedience to them furthers 

 harmony. Though it is true that directions concerning the 

 distribution of property often initiate new quarrels, yet in 

 respect of pre-existing quarrels, the known wish of the 

 dying . man that they should be ended, is influential in 

 causing compromise or forgiveness ; and if there has been a 

 desire on his part that some particular course or policy should 

 be pursued after his death, this desire, even orally expressed, 

 tends very much to become a law to his descendants, and so 

 to produce unity of action among them. 



If in our days these influences still have considerable 

 power, they must have had great power in days when 

 there was a vivid conception of ancestral ghosts as liable to 

 be made angry by disregard of their wishes, and able to 

 punish the disobedient. Evidently the family-cult in primi 

 tive times, must have greatly tended to maintain the family 

 bond : alike by causing periodic assemblings for sacrifice, by 

 repressing dissensions, and by producing conformity to the 

 same injunctions. 



Rising as we do from the ordinary father to the patriarch 

 heading numerous families, propitiation of whose ghost ia 

 imperative on all of them, and thence to some head of 

 kindred clans who, leading them to conquest, becomes after 

 death a local chief god, above all others feared and obeyed ; 

 we may expect to find in the cults everywhere derived from 

 ancestor-worship, the same influence which ancestor-worship 

 in its simple original form shows us. We shall not be 



