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.

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. If it 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 dictory and fears so vain? Surely it need not be so. The necessary limitations of human nature make

so contra

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.*