almost every people. Charon and his boat might be the means of
conveyance. Or the believer, dying in battle for the creed of the
Faithful, might expect to wake up in a celestial harem peopled with
Houris. Or the belief might embody the matchless horrors painted by
Dante; his dolorous city with the terrible inscription over its
entrance-gate: "_Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate_."

Again, the conception might be of a long unconscious interval after
death, succeeded at last by a resuscitation; or it might be of another
world, the supplement and immediate continuation of this, into which
Death, herald, not destroyer, ushers us even while human friends are yet
closing our eyes and composing our limbs. It might be of the Paradise in
which, on the very day of the crucifixion, the penitent thief was to
meet the Saviour of mankind; or it might be of that Heaven, yet increate
or unpeopled, seen by some in long, distant perspective, shadowed forth
in such lines as these:--

"That man, when laid in lonesome grave,
Shall sleep in Death's dark gloom,
Until the eternal morning wake
The slumbers of the tomb."

Yet again, the idea may be of a Future of which the denizens shall be,
on some Great Day, tried as before an earthly court, doomed as by an
earthly tribunal, and sentence pronounced against them by a presiding
God, who, of his own omnipotent will, decides to inflict upon sinners
condign punishment, in measure far beyond all earthly severity,--torment
in quenchless flames, with no drop of water to cool the parched tongue,
for ever and ever.

In other words, we may conceive, as to human destiny in another world,
either of punishments optional and arbitrary, growing out of the
indignation of an offended Judge who hates and requites sin, or of
punishments natural and inherent, growing out of the very nature of sin
itself, as _delirium tremens_ requites a long career of intemperance. We
may conceive of punishments which are the awards of judicial vengeance;
or we may believe in those only which are the inevitable results of
eternal and immutable law, a necessary sequence in the next life to the
bad passions and evil deeds of this.

Those who incline to this latter aspect of the Great Future, as the
scene of reward or punishment supervening in the natural order of
things, may chance to find interest, beyond mere curiosity, in the
following strange narrative.

* * * * *