vast,
including innumerable systems, and all governed by invariable
laws. But let us return from this episode.

The foregoing sixfold argument, preserving us from the remorseless
grasp of annihilation, leaves to us unchanged the problem of the
relations which shall be sustained by the disembodied soul to time
and space, the question as to the locality of the spirit world,
the scene of our future life. Sheol, Hades, Tartarus, Valhalla
with its mead brimmed horns, Blessed Isles, Elysium, supernal
Olympus, firmamental Heaven, paradisal Eden, definite sites of
celestial Worlds for departed souls, the Chaldee's golden orbs,
the Sanscrit Meru, the Indian Hunting Ground, the Moslem's love
bowers, and wine rivers, and gem palaces thronged with dark eyed
houris, these notions, and all similar ones, of material
residences for spirits, located and bounded, we must dismiss as
dreams and cheats of the childish world's unripe fancy. There is
no evidence for any thing of that coarse, crude sort. The
fictitious theological Heaven is a deposit of imagination on the
azure ground of infinity, like a bird's nest on Himalaya. What,
then, shall we say? Why, in the first place, that, while there are
reasons enough and room enough for an undisheartened faith in the
grand fact of human immortality, it is beyond our present powers
to establish any detailed conclusions in regard to its locality or
its scenery.

But surely, in the second place, we should say that it becomes us,
when reflecting on the scenes to be opened to us at death, to rise
to a more ideal and sublime view than any of those tangible
figments which were the products of untrained sensual imagination
and gross materialistic theory. When the fleshly prison walls of
the mind fall, its first inheritance is a stupendous freedom. The
narrow limits that caged it here are gone, and it lives in an
ethereal sphere with no impeding bounds. Leaving its natal
threshold of earth and the lazar house of time, its home is
immensity, and its lease is eternity. Even in our present state,
to a true

36 More Worlds than One the Creed of the Philosopher and the Hope
of the Christian.

37 Essay on the Unity or Plurality of Worlds. See, furthermore, in
Westminster Review, July, 1858, Recent Astronomy and the Nebular
Hypothesis.

38 Volger, Erde and Ewigkeit. (Natural History of the Earth as a
Periodical Process of Development in Opposition to the Unnatural
Geology of Revolutions and Catastrop