hat a bad man
could succeed or a good one fail; and as the ways of Providence,
therefore, require no vindicating, neither his imagination nor his
curiosity tempts him into penetrating the future. The house of Hades is
the long home to which men go when dismissed out of their bodies; but it
is a dim, shadowy place, of which we see nothing, and concerning which
no conjectures are ventured. Achilles, in his passion over Patroclus,
cries out, that although the dead forget the dead in the halls of the
departed, yet that he will remember his friend; and through the Iliad
there is nothing clearer than these vague words to show with what hopes
or fears the poet looked forward to death. So far, therefore, his faith
may seem imperfect; yet, perhaps, not the less noble because imperfect;
religious men in general are too well contented with the promise of a
future life, as of a scene where the seeming shortcomings of the Divine
administration will be carried out with larger equity. But whether
imperfect or not, or whatever be the account of the omission, the theory
of Hades in the Odyssey is developed into far greater distinctness; the
future is still, indeed, shadowy, but it is no longer uncertain; there
is the dreadful prison-house, with the judge upon his throne--and the
darker criminals are overtaken by the vengeance which was delayed in
life. The thin phantoms of the great ones of the past flit to and fro,
mourning wearily for their lost mortality, and feeding on its memory.
And more than this, as if it were beginning to be felt that something
more was wanted after all to satisfy us with the completeness of the
Divine rule, we have a glimpse--it is but one, but it is like a ray of
sunshine falling in upon the darkness of the grave--'of the far-off
Elysian fields where dwells Rhadamanthus with the golden hair, where
life is ever sweet, and sorrow is not, nor winter, nor any rain or
storm, and the never-dying zephyrs blow soft and cool from off the
ocean.'

However vague the filling up of such a picture, the outline is correct
to the best which has been revealed even in Christianity, and it speaks
nobly for the people among whom, even in germ, such ideas could root
themselves. But think what we will of their notions of the future, the
old Greek faith, considered as a practical and not a theological system,
is truly admirable, clear, rational, and moral; if it does not profess
to deal with the mysteries of evil in the heart, it i