is to tarry
unalterably. This idea of the banishment or admission of souls,
according to their deserts, or according to an elective grace,
into an anchored location called hell or heaven, a retributive or
rewarding residence for eternity, we shall pass by with few words,
because it recurs for fuller examination in other chapters. In the
first place, the whole picture is a gross simile drawn from
occurrences of this outward world and unjustifiably applied to the
fortunes of the mind in the invisible sphere of the future. The
figment of a judicial transportation of the soul from one place or
planet to another, as if by a Charon's boat, is a clattering and
repulsive conceit, inadmissible by one who apprehends the
noiseless continuity of God's self executing laws. It is a jarring
mechanical clash thrust amidst the smooth evolution of spiritual
destinies. It compares with the facts as the supposition that the
planets are swung around the sun by material chains compares with
the law of gravitation.

Moral compensation is no better secured by imprisonment or freedom
in separate localities than it is, in a common environment, by the
fatal working of their interior forces of character, and their
relations with all things else. Moreover, these antagonist
kingdoms, Tartarean and Elysian, defined as the everlasting
habitations of departed souls, have been successively driven, as
dissipated visions, from their assumed latitudes and longitudes,
one after another, by progressive discovery, until now the
intelligent mind knows of no assignable spot for them. Since we
are not acquainted with any fixed locations to which the soul is
to be carried, to abide there forever in appointed joy or woe, and
since there is no scientific necessity nor moral use for the
supposition of such places and of the transferrence of the
departed to them, we cannot hesitate to reject the associated
belief as a deluding mistake. The truth, as we conceive it, is not
that different souls are borne by constabulary apparitions to two
immured dwellings, manacled and hurried into Tophet or saluted and
ushered into Paradise, but that all souls spontaneously pass into
one immense empire, drawn therein by their appropriate
attractions, to assimilate a strictly discriminative experience.
But, as to this, let each thinker form his own conclusion.

The fifth view of the destination of the soul may be called the
theory of recurrence.8 When man dies, his surviving spir