rms and with the most picturesque details. In tempests the
ghosts of their famous warriors ride on the thunderbolts, looking
on the earth with eyes of fire, and hurling lances of lightning.
They float over the summits of the hills or along the valleys in
wreaths of mist, on vapory steeds, waving their shadowy arms in
the moonlight, the stars dimly glimmering through their visionary
shapes. The Laplanders also placed their heaven in the upper air,
where the Northern Lights play. They regarded the auroral
streamers as the sport of departed spirits in the happy region to
which they had risen. Such ideas, clad in the familiar imagery
furnished by their own climes, would naturally be suggested to the
ignorant fancy, and easily commended to the credulous thoughts, of
the Celts and Finns. Explanation and refutation are alike
unnecessary.

Plutarch describes a theory held by some of the ancients locating
hell in the air, elysium in the moon.18 After death all souls are
compelled to spend a period in the region between the earth and
the moon, the wicked in severe tortures and for a longer time, the
good in a mild discipline soon purging away all their stains and
fitting them for the lunar paradise. After tarrying a season
there, they were either born again upon the earth, or transported
to the divine realm of the sun. Macrobius, too, says, "The
Platonists reckon as the infernal

17 Part iv. chap. ix. p. 417. Dr. Cumming (The End, Lect. X.)
teaches the doctrine of the literal resurrection of the flesh, and
the subsequent residence of the redeemed on this globe as their
eternal heaven under the immediate rule of Christ. Quite a full
detail of the historic and present belief in this scheme may be
found in the recent work of its earnest advocate, D. T. Taylor,
The Voice of the Church on the Coming of the Redeemer, or a
History of the Doctrine of the Reign of Christ on Earth.

18 In his Essay on the Face in the Orb of the Moon.

region the whole space between the earth and the moon."19 He also
adds, "The tropical signs Cancer and Capricorn are called the
gates of the sun, because there he meets the solstice and can go
no farther. Cancer is the gate of men, because by it is the
descent to the lower regions; Capricorn is the gate of gods,
because by it is a return for souls to the rank of gods in the
seat of their proper immortality." 20 The Manicheans taught that
souls were borne to the moon on leaving their bodies, and there