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ous emblem of their own struggling faith, not as a beacon to the straying ghost. Again, the Indian mother, losing a nursing infant, spurts some of her milk into the fire, that the little spirit may not want for nutriment on its solitary path.31 Plato approvingly quotes Hesiod's statement that the souls of noble men become guardian demons coursing the air, messengers and agents of the gods in the world. Therefore, he adds, "we should reverence their tombs and establish solemn rites and offerings there;" though by his very statement these places were not the dwellings or haunts of the freely circuiting spirits.32 Not by an intellectual doctrine, but by an instinctive association, when not resisted and corrected, we connect the souls of the dead in our thoughts with the burial places of their forms. The New Zealand priests pretend by their spells to bring wandering souls within the enclosed graveyards.33 These sepulchral folds are full of ghosts. A sentiment native to the human breast draws pilgrims to the tombs of Shakspeare and Washington, and, if not restrained and guided by cultivated thought, would lead them to make offerings there. Until the death of Louis XV., the kings of France lay in state and were served as in life for forty days after they died.34 It would be ridiculous to attempt to wring any doctrinal significance from these customs. The same sentiment which, in one form, among the Alfoer inhabitants of the Arru Islands, when a man dies, leads his relatives to assemble and destroy whatever he has left, which, in another form, causes the Papist to offer burning candles, wreaths, and crosses, and to recite prayers, before the shrines of the dead saints, which, in still another form, moved Albert Durer to place all the pretty playthings of his child in the coffin and bury them with it, this same sentiment, in its undefined spontaneous workings, impelled the Peruvian to embalm his dead, the Blackfoot to inter his brave's hunting equipments with him, and the Cherokee squaw to hang fresh food above the totem on her husband's grave post. What should we think if we could foresee that, a thousand years hence, when the present doctrines and customs of France and America are forgotten, some antiquary, seeking the reason why the mourners in Pere la Chaise and Mount Auburn laid clusters of flowers on the graves of their lamented ones, should deliberately conclude that it was believed the souls remained in the bodies i
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