51 a large octavo entitled
"The Many Mansions in the House of the Father," discussing with
elaborate detail the question as to the locality of the scenes
awaiting souls after death. His grand conclusion the unreasonableness
of which will be apparent without comment is as follows:
"The saints having first risen with Christ into the highest
regions of the air, out of reach of the dreadful heat, the
tremendous flood of fire hitherto detained inside the earth will
be let loose, and an awful conflagration rage till the whole
material globe is dissipated into sublimated particles. Then the
world will be formed anew, in three parts. First, there will be

15 Wright, St. Patrick's Purgatory: an Essay on the Legends of
Paradise, Hell, and Purgatory, current during the Middle Ages.

16 Patuzzi, De Sede inferni in Terris quarenda.

a solid central sphere of fire the flaming nucleus of Gehenna two
thousand miles in diameter. Secondly, there shall roll around this
central ball on all sides an ignited ocean of liquid fire two
thousand miles in depth, the peculiar residence of the wicked, the
sulphurous lake spoken of in the Apocalypse. Thirdly, around this
infernal sea a vast spherical arch will hang, a thousand miles
thick, a massive and unbroken shell, through which there are no
spiracles, and whose external surface, beautiful beyond
conception, becomes the heaven of the redeemed, where Christ
himself, perfect man as well as perfect God, fixes his residence
and establishes the local sovereignty of the Universal Archangel."
17 A comfortable thought it must be for the saints, as they roam
the flowery fields, basking in immortal bliss, to remember that
under the crust they tread, a soundless sea of fire is forever
plunging on its circular course, all its crimson waves packed with
the agonized faces of the damned as thick as drops! The whole
scheme is without real foundation. Science laughs at such a
theory. Its scriptural supports are either ethnic figments or
rhetorical tropes. Reason, recollecting the immateriality of the
soul, dissipates the ghastly dream beyond the possibility of
restoration to belief.

Following the historic locations of the abode of departed souls,
we next ascend from the interior of the earth, and above the
surface of the earth, into the air and the lofty realms of ether.
The ancient Caledonians fixed the site of their spirit world in
the clouds. Their bards have presented this conception in manifold
fo