it was nothing else
but the proper arrangement of all the machine of the body, a doctrine
which could not be admitted any more as the cause of in men than in
beasts; we cannot therefore be surprised that they had such gross
ideas concerning their state after death.

"The error of the Greeks, which they communicated to the Romans, and
the latter to our ancestors was, that the souls whose bodies were not
solemnly interred by the ministry of the priests of religion, wandered
out of Hades without finding any repose, until their bodies had been
burned and their ashes collected. Homer makes Patroclus, who was
killed by Hector, appear to his friend Achilles in the night to ask
him for burial, without which, he is deprived, he says, of the
privilege of passing the river Acheron. There were only the souls of
those who had been drowned, whom they believed unable to return to
earth after death; for which we find a curious reason in Servius, the
interpreter of Virgil, who says, the greater number of the learned in
Virgil's time, and Virgil himself, believing that the soul was nothing
but a fire, which animated and moved the body, were persuaded that the
fire was entirely extinguished by the water--as if the material could
act upon the spiritual. Virgil explains his opinions on the subject
of souls very clearly in these verses:--

'Igneus est ollis vigor, et celestis origo.'

And a little after,

'totos infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et toto se corpore miscet;'

to mark the universal soul of the world, which he believed with the
greater part of the philosophers of his time.

"Again, it was a common error amongst the pagans, to believe that the
souls of those who died before they were of their proper age, which
they placed at the end of their growth, wandered about until the time
came when they ought naturally to be separated from their bodies.
Plato, more penetrating and better informed than the others, although
like them mistaken, said, that the souls of the just who had obeyed
virtue ascended to the sky; and that those who had been guilty of
impiety, retaining still the contagion of the earthly matter of the
body, wandered incessantly around the tombs, appearing like shadows
and phantoms.

"For us, whom religion teaches that our souls are spiritual substances
created by God, and united for a time to bodies, we know that there
are three different states after death.

"Those who enjoy eternal b