at it is a
truth man has no idea of a future life; they are the ideas of the past
and the present, that furnish his imagination with the materials of
which he constructs the edifice of the regions of futurity. Hobbes says,
'We believe that, that which is will always be, and that the same causes
will have the same effects.' Man in his actual state has two modes
of feeling--one, that he approves; another, that he disapproves: thus
persuaded that these two modes of feeling must accompany him even
beyond his present existence, he placed in the regions of eternity two
distinguished abodes; one destined to felicity; the other to misery: the
one must contain those who obey the calls of superstition, who believe
in its dogmas; the other is a prison, destined to avenge the cause
of heaven on all those who shall not faithfully believe the doctrines
promulgated by the ministers of a vast variety of superstitions. Has
sufficient attention been paid to the fact that results as a necessary
consequence from this reasoning; which on examination will be found
to have rendered the first place entirely useless, seeing, that by
the number and contradiction of these various systems, let man believe
whichever he may, let him follow it in the most faithful manner, still
he must be ranked as an Infidel, as a rebel to the divinity; because
he cannot believe in all; and those from which he dissents, by a
consequence of their own creed, condemn him to the prison-house?--Such
is the origin of the ideas upon a future life, so diffused among
mankind. Everywhere may be seen an Elysium, and a Tartarus, a Paradise
and a Hell; in a word, two distinguished abodes, constructed according
to the imagination of the enthusiasts who have invented them; who have
accommodated them to their own peculiar prejudices, to the hopes, to the
fears of the people who believe in them. The Indian figures the first of
these abodes as one of inaction, of permanent repose, because, being the
inhabitant of a hot climate, he has learned to contemplate rest as the
extreme of felicity: the Mussulman promises himself corporeal pleasures,
similar to those that actually constitute the object of his research in
this life: each figures to himself that on which he has learned to set
the greatest value."

"As for the miserable abode of souls, the imagination of fanatics,
who were desirous of governing the people, strove to assemble the most
frightful images to render it still more terri