far on the neck of night, be disenchanted of their
imaginary charms, and brought, by the advance of discovery, within
the relentless light of familiarity, for the common gaze of
fleshly eyes and tread of vulgar feet, still the prophetic MIND
would not be robbed of its belief in immortality; still the
unquenchable instincts of the HEART would retain, uninjured, the
great expectation of ANOTHER WORLD, although no traveller returns
from its voiceless bourne to tell in what local direction it lies,
no voyager comes back from its mystic port to describe its
latitude and longitude on the chartless infinite of space.

Turn we now from the lateral distribution of notions as to a
future life, to their lineal development. We have seen that the
development of belief as to the locality of our future destination
has been a chase of places, over the earth, under the earth,
through the sky, as fast as the unknown was brought within the
known, until it has stopped at the verge of the unknowable. There
we stand, confessing our inability to fix the scene. The doctrine
of the conditions and contents of the future life has followed the
same course as that of its locality.

In the first stage of belief the future life consists of the gross
conditions and materials of the known present reflected, under the
impulse of the senses, into the unknown future. This style of
faith prevailed for a vast period, and is not yet obsolete. When
the King of Dahomey has done a great feat, he kills a man to carry
the tidings to the ghost of his royal father. When he dies
himself, a host are killed, that he may enter Deadland with a
becoming cortege. His wives also are slain, or commit suicide,
that they may rejoin him.

The second stage of belief is reached when, under the ethical
impulse, only certain refined elements of the present,
discriminated portions of the products of reason, imagination and
sentiment, are reflected into the future, and accepted as the
facts of the life there. Critical processes, applied to thought
and faith, cause the rejection of much that was received. That
alone which answers to our wants, and has coherence, continues to
be held

40 Chalmers, Sermon, Heaven a Character and not a Locality.

as truth. An example is afforded by Augustine in his essay, De
Libero Arbitrio. He argues that the wicked are kept in being on
the out skirts of the material universe; partly wretched, partly
happy; too bad for heaven, too good for an