r to their memories the homage which we
paid, or perhaps grudged, to the men themselves in their lifetime. For
us they seem still to exist; with their features, their characteristic
turns of thought and speech still fresh in our memories, we can hardly
bring ourselves to believe that they have utterly ceased to be, that
nothing of them remains but the lifeless dust which we have committed to
the earth. The heart still clings fondly to the hope, if not to the
belief, that somewhere beyond our ken the loved and lost ones are joined
to the kindred spirits who have gone before in that unknown land, where,
in due time, we shall meet them again. And as with affection, so with
reverence and fear; they also are powerful incentives to this
instinctive belief in the continued existence of the dead. The busy
brain that explored the heights and depths of this mysterious
universe--the glowing imagination that conjured up visions of beauty
born, as we fondly think, for immortality--the aspiring soul and
vaulting ambition that founded or overturned empires and shook the
world--are they now no more than a few mouldering bones or a handful of
ashes under their marble monuments? The mind of most men revolts from a
conclusion so derogatory to what they deem the dignity of human nature;
and so to satisfy at once the promptings of the imagination and the
impulse of the heart, men gradually elevate their dead to the rank of
saints and heroes, who in course of time may easily pass by an almost
insensible transition to the supreme place of deities. It is thus that,
almost as far back as we can trace the gropings of the human mind, man
has been perpetually creating gods in his own likeness.

In a pantheon thus constantly recruited by the accession of dead men,
the recruits tend to swamp the old deities by sheer force of numbers;
for whereas the muster-roll of the original gods is fixed and
unchangeable, the newcomers form a great host which is not only
innumerable but perpetually on the increase, for who can reckon up the
tale of the departed or set bounds to the ravages of death? Indeed,
where the deification of the dead is carried to its logical limit, a new
god is born for every man that dies; though in Tonga against such an
extreme expansion of the spiritual hierarchy, and a constant
overcrowding of Bolotoo, a solid barrier was interposed by the Tongan
doctrine which opened the gates of paradise only to noblemen.[132]

[132] We have se