ndred of punishment in the life to come?
We should be ready to die of pity if we could see the least of the
sufferings which the writers of Infernos and Purgatorios have attributed
to the damned. Yet these joys and terrors seem hardly to exercise an
appreciable influence over the lives of men. The wicked man when old,
is not, as Plato supposes (Republic), more agitated by the terrors of
another world when he is nearer to them, nor the good in an ecstasy at
the joys of which he is soon to be the partaker. Age numbs the sense of
both worlds; and the habit of life is strongest in death. Even the dying
mother is dreaming of her lost children as they were forty or fifty
years before, 'pattering over the boards,' not of reunion with them
in another state of being. Most persons when the last hour comes are
resigned to the order of nature and the will of God. They are not
thinking of Dante's Inferno or Paradiso, or of the Pilgrim's Progress.
Heaven and hell are not realities to them, but words or ideas; the
outward symbols of some great mystery, they hardly know what. Many
noble poems and pictures have been suggested by the traditional
representations of them, which have been fixed in forms of art and can
no longer be altered. Many sermons have been filled with descriptions
of celestial or infernal mansions. But hardly even in childhood did the
thought of heaven and hell supply the motives of our actions, or at any
time seriously affect the substance of our belief.

8. Another life must be described, if at all, in forms of thought
and not of sense. To draw pictures of heaven and hell, whether in the
language of Scripture or any other, adds nothing to our real knowledge,
but may perhaps disguise our ignorance. The truest conception which
we can form of a future life is a state of progress or education--a
progress from evil to good, from ignorance to knowledge. To this we are
led by the analogy of the present life, in which we see different races
and nations of men, and different men and women of the same nation,
in various states or stages of cultivation; some more and some less
developed, and all of them capable of improvement under favourable
circumstances. There are punishments too of children when they are
growing up inflicted by their parents, of elder offenders which are
imposed by the law of the land, of all men at all times of life,
which are attached by the laws of nature to the performance of certain
actions. All these