r conduct while in the flesh, but by the manner of
death, the punctuality with which certain sepulchral rites were
fulfilled by relatives, or other similar arbitrary circumstance beyond
the power of the individual to control. This view, which I am well aware
is directly at variance with that of all previous writers, may be shown
to be that natural to the uncultivated intellect everywhere, and the
real interpretation of the creeds of America. Whether these arbitrary
circumstances were not construed to signify the decision of the Divine
Mind on the life of the man, is a deeper question, which there is no
means at hand to solve.

Those who have complained of the hopeless confusion of American
religions have but proven the insufficiency of their own means of
analyzing them. The uniformity which they display in so many points is
nowhere more fully illustrated than in the unanimity with which they all
point to the _sun_ as the land of the happy souls, the realm of the
blessed, the scene of the joyous hunting-grounds of the hereafter. Its
perennial glory, its comfortable warmth, its daily analogy to the life
of man, marked its abode as the pleasantest spot in the universe. It
matters not whether the eastern Algonkins pointed to the south, others
of their nation, with the Iroquois and Creeks, to the west, or many
tribes to the east, as the direction taken by the spirit; all these
myths but mean that its bourn is the home of the sun, which is perhaps
in the Orient whence he comes forth, in the Occident where he makes his
bed, or in the South whither he retires in the chilling winter. Where
the sun lives, they informed the earliest foreign visitors, were the
villages of the deceased, and the milky way which nightly spans the arch
of heaven, was, in their opinion, the road that led thither, and was
called the path of the souls (_le chemin des ames_).[244-1] To _hueyu
ku_, the mansion of the sun, said the Caribs, the soul passes when death
overtakes the body.[244-2] Our knowledge is scanty of the doctrines
taught by the Incas concerning the soul, but this much we do know, that
they looked to the sun, their recognized lord and protector, as he who
would care for them at death, and admit them to his palaces. There--not,
indeed, exquisite joys--but a life of unruffled placidity, void of
labor, vacant of strong emotions, a sort of material Nirvana, awaited
them.[244-3] For these reasons, they, with most other American nations,
interred