d just discriminations
to be made in the under world. Into that realm many gates are shown
leading, some of them peaceful, inviting, surrounded by apparent
emblems of deliverance, rest, and blessedness; others yawning,
terrific, engirt by the heads of gnashing beasts and furies
threatening their victim.

"Shown is the progress of the guilty soul
From earth's worn threshold to the throne of doom;
Here the black genius to the dismal goal
Drags the wan spectre from the unsheltering tomb,
While from the side it never more may warn
The better angel, sorrowing, flees forlorn.
There (closed the eighth) seven yawning gates reveal
The sevenfold anguish that awaits the lost.
Closed the eighth gate, for there the happy dwell.
No glimpse of joy beyond makes horror less."

In these lines, from Bulwer's learned and ornate epic of King
Arthur, the dire severity of the Etruscan doctrine of a future
life is well indicated, with the local imagery of some parts of
it, and the impenetrable obscurity which enwraps the great sequel.

CHAPTER V.

EGYPTIAN DOCTRINE OF A FUTURE LIFE.

IN attempting to understand the conceptions of the ancient
inhabitants of Egypt on the subject of a future life, we are first
met by the inquiry why they took such great pains to preserve the
bodies of their dead. It has been supposed that no common motive
could have animated them to such lavish expenditure of money,
time, and labor as the process of embalming required. It has been
taken for granted that only some recondite theological
consideration could explain this phenomenon. Accordingly, it is
now the popular belief that the Egyptians were so scrupulous in
embalming their dead and storing them in repositories of eternal
stone, because they believed that the departed souls would at some
future time come back and revivify their former bodies, if these
were kept from decay. This hypothesis seems to us as false as it
is gratuitous. In the first place, there is no evidence of it
whatever, neither written testimony nor circumstantial hint.
Herodotus tells us, "The Egyptians say the soul, on the
dissolution of the body, always enters into some other animal then
born, and, having passed in rotation through the various
terrestrial, aquatic, and arial beings, again enters the body of a
man then born."1 There is no assertion that, at the end of the
three thousand years occupied by this circuit, the soul will re
enter its former body. The plain inference, on