Goth. Those who had died peacefully-women, and all less glorious souls-were debarred from Odin's palace, and compelled to seek refuge in Freya's domain or in 'Hela's iced abode,' the original of our hell. We have seen that the warriors of Islam fought bravely in view of a paradise of repose and luxury. The Goth fought no less fiercely in prospect of a world of eternal strife. The inference seems obvious that to the former sensual gratification was the aim of his labours, while the latter loved war for war's sake, and could conceive of no happiness in which it was not to find a prominent place. There was apparently nothing to be gained by the daily battles of the heroes; they merely went forth to hack and hew one another in no courteous tournament, but with sharp swords and blows altogether in earnest; and then the pleasure for that day was over. Perhaps it is not very wonderful that the descendants of the race which fought for the Moslem's paradise, when they have come across the descendants of the race who fought for Valhalla, should invariably go to the ground. Assuredly the process of converting the wild worshippers of Odin to peaceful Christians sighing for an apocalyptic New Jerusalem, with gates of pearl, must have been one of no ordinary difficulty. We are not surprised to hear of Olaf the Saint endeavouring to accomplish it by the rough and ready method of placing all the bards and priests of the ancient faith on whom he could lay hand upon those rocky islets round the coast of Norway, which to this day are called 'Skerries of Shrieks,' in memory of the victims left there to be slowly engulfed by the tide.

The worst penalty of wickedness threatened by the Odinist religion is one as widely diverse from the always recurring fiery cave of the southern imagination as Valhalla is diverse from Paradise. The description of it, as well as I can remember, was quoted from the Prose Edda not long ago, and runs as follows:

'On Na Strand (the shore of the

dead) there is a great hall and a bad. It is all built of adders' backs wattled together. And the adders' venom runs on the floor of the hall to the height of a man's breast; and in this venom the souls of the perfidious and of murderers must wade for ever and ever.'

We must now draw these superficial observations of a most curious subject to a close without noticing more particularly the ideas of the remaining nations. Many of these deserve, however, careful attention, as for example, the Druid with his doctrine of eternal progress from Abred, the state of darkness and ignorance, to Gwynwyd, the state of knowledge and felicity; the Sabean, with his four thousand years of purgatory; the Peruvian, with his long ages of wearisome labour (most dire of penalties to his indolent nature); the Aztec, with his hell ruled by the terrific devil Tlateacolocotl, the Rational Owl; and the Red-man, with his 'Happy Hunting Grounds,' where,

United in that equal sky, His faithful dog shall bear him company.

If it

Perhaps of all the simple notions of futurity held by uncivilized tribes and revealing their humble hopes and fears, the most noticeable is that of the Greenlanders. happens, they say, that on the day of a man's death the weather be stormy, it will be very dangerous for his soul, which is pale and soft, and devoid of bones, to perform the difficult journey through the rocks and chasms leading to the under world. Should he be able, however, to pass in safety, he will arrive at last at the paradise which is under the sea. There he will never be cold any more, for there will be fires all the year round, as much as he could desire. Neither will he ever be hungry again, for there is salt fish laid up in that place which will supply him to all eternity.

Is this review of so many varied dreams of worlds of joy and agony a melancholy one? Shall we leave it with a sigh for hopes so contradictory and fears so vain? Surely it need not be so. The necessary limitations of human nature make

the imagination of all details of another existence, on the very hypothesis, absurd. Because it is another and a different world from this, our ideas of it are inevitably false; for we can but recombine and modify the conditions we know of here, and there all things must be changed. The one thing we can predicate of Heaven is that it must be like nothing on earth. But the universality of the belief that such a world exists, the conviction common to all races that the soul of

a man never dies-that is not a melancholy subject of reflection, but a blessed one. From the opposite ends of the earth, from remotest time till now, from the Brahmin to the Greenlander, from the contemporary of the mammoth to the civilized man of to-day-all have borne the same testimony. The faith in immortality is written on the heart of humanity. There is but One Hand which could have engraved it there, and that Hand writes no falsehoods.*

her own child was not a pleasant alternative to the rule of the husband! Colonel Sleeman gives an instance from his own experience of the pertinacity with which a widow persisted in undergoing suttee, which seems one of the most curious facts of psychology ever recorded. I quote the story from memory; but the reader can refer to Colonel Sleeman's very interesting volumes.

On one occasion, when he held some command in the country, a Brahmin gentleman died in the neighbourhood, and a poor Soodra

woman

immediately afterwards sought an audience of Colonel Sleeman. Her object was to obtain his official consent, which was needful, for her performance of the suttee on the pyre of the deceased gentleman. Colonel Sleeman, naturally much surprised, remonstrated with the woman, that she was not the wife of the gentleman, and had a living husband of her own caste. 'That is true,' she replied; 'but the gentleman was my husband in three previous lives, and if I am now burnt with him I shall be his wife in the next life.' 'You must be mistaken,' answered the bewildered Colonel, for you are a Soodra, and a Soodra cannot have been the wife of a Brahmin.' 'I was a Brahmin woman,' she retorted; but I was degraded for this life because of an offence I committed in my last existence. I was standing in my husband's house one day, when a holy man came to me and asked alms, and he asked for sugar, but I gave him salt, and he cursed me that I should be born a Soodra, and so for this life I have been degraded; but if your honour will permit me to perform suttee on the Brahmin gentleman's pyre, then I shall be born again a Brahmin, and shall marry him again.' In vain Colonel Sleeman expended his rhetoric and his logic in trying to persuade the woman to give up her delusion. Finding all argument useless, he ended by forbidding peremptorily

that the ceremony of suttee should be performed in his jurisdiction. But the woman was too resolute to be defeated in her intention. She made her sons build for her a pyre in a lonely corner of the jungle, and there, on the day of her imaginary husband's incremation, she was privately burned by her real husband and children, without any of the pomp, or noise, or intoxicating drinks which usually serve to madden the poor victims of this hideous superstition. Whether we consider the extraordinary and precise nature of the delusion which seized on this hapless creature, or the firmness of faith and resolute courage which induced her to endure martyrdom on its behalf, the tale is equally worthy of remembrance.

The Adee Grunth, the sacred book of the Sikhs, has a beautiful passage condemning such immolations:

They are not Suttees who perish in the flames,

O Nanuk!

Suttees are they who die of a broken heart.

Turning from the Brahmin to the Buddhist religion, we come upon the doctrine which, above all others, strikes the European mind as unaccountable-the doctrine of Niwane, or Absorption into the Deity. The ultimate summit of Buddhist hopes is this final termination of personality. For all manner of sins the future life contains conditions of expiation, long and terrible, but yet finite. He who has gone to the place of misery,' say the Buddhist authorities, after he has suffered enough for his miserable sins, it appears that he can become free."* But when all expiations and changes of happiness and suffering have been gone through, if the man reaches the highest pitch of virtue, his reward is this mysterious Niwane. It will be fresh in every one's mind that the precise nature of this state was disputed two or three years ago in the public papers in England by the best Buddhist scholars, and that at the end of the controversy it ap

P. II.