people in deciding the
character of their anticipations of the future. The Esquimaux
paradise is surrounded by great pots full of boiled walrus meat.
The Turk's heaven is a gorgeously idealized pleasure garden or
celestial harem. As the apparition of a man wanders into the next
state, a shadow of his present state floats over into the future
with him. The Hereafter is the image flung by the Now. Heaven and
hell are the upward and downward echoes of the earth. Like the
spectre of the Brocken on the Hartz Mountains, our ideas of
another life are a reflection of our present experience thrown in
colossal on the cloud curtains of futurity. Charles Lamb, pushing
this elucidating observation much further, says, "The shapings of
our heavens are the modifications of our constitutions." A tribe
of savages has been described who hoped to go after death to their
forefathers in an under ground elysium whose glory consisted in
eternal drunkenness, that being their highest conception of bliss
and glory. What can be more piteous than the contemplation of
those barbarians whose existence here is so wretched that even
their imagination and faith have lost all rebound, and who
conceive of the land of souls only as poorer and harder than this,
expecting to be tasked and beaten there by stronger spirits, and
to have nothing to eat? The relation of master and servant, the
tyranny of class, is reflected over into the other life in those
aristocratic notions which break out frequently in the history of
our subject. The Pharisees some of them, at least excluded the
rabble from the resurrection. The Peruvians confined their heaven
to the nobility. The New Zealanders said the souls of the Atuas,
the nobles, were immortal, but the Cookees perished entirely.
Meiners declares that the Russians, even so late as the times of
Peter the Great, believed that only the Czar and the boyars could
reach heaven. It was almost a universal custom among savage
nations when a chieftain died to slay his wives and servants, that
their ghosts might accompany his to paradise, to wait on him there
as here. Even among the Greeks, as Bulwer has well remarked, "the
Hades of the ancients was not for the many; and the dwellers of
Elysium are chiefly confined to the oligarchy of earth."

The coarse and selfish assumption on the part of man of
superiority over woman, based on his brawniness and tyranny, has
sometimes appeared in the form of an assertion that

5 Churchill,