"What gain?" a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory. Seneca, the most correct moralist among the ancient pagans, speaks of the hopes of a better life as “a kind of pleasing dream, an opinion embraced by great men, very agreeable indeed, but which they promised rather than proved." Again he says: "Perhaps, if the report of wise men be true, and some place receives us after death, he whom we think to have perished is only sent before." In another place: "If it be so, that souls remain after they are set loose from the body, a happier state awaits them, than whilst they are in the body." Here again is that cheerless "if." One who was mourning for the death of his brother, he directs to comfort himself thus: "If the dead have no sense, the soul of my brother has escaped from all the incommodities of life, and is restored to that state he was in before he was born; and being free from all evil, fears nothing, desires nothing, suffers nothing. If the dead have any sense, the soul of my brother, being let loose as it were from a long confinement, and entirely his own master, exults, and enjoys a clear sight of the nature of things, and looks down as from a higher situation upon all things human with contempt; and he has a nearer view of divine things, the reasons of which he has long sought in vain. Why therefore do I languish for the want of him, who is either happy, or not at all? To lament one that is happy is envy, and one that has no existence, is madness.' Alas! is not this the comfort of those who have no hope? Plutarch's comfort, in regard to a future life, is equally cold. "In his consolation to Apollonius,' says Leland, "he observes, that Socrates said, that death is either like to a sleep, or to a journey afar off and of long continuance, or to the entire extinction of soul and body." He then shows, that on either of these suppositions death can be no evil; and yet how cheerless to a Christian's mind is the best of them! How comfortless is the prospect of an eternal deep sleep, to one who has known the exquisiteness of waking joys! By the journey of long continuance, he no doubt means the common notion of the soul's transmigration through an endless line of bodies and beings, or with the joyless hope of losing its own separate existence at length, by an absorption into the great soul of Divinity! There is no comfort in this. As to total extinction, the soul shrinks from it, and shudders at the idea. The worst of woes is scarcely more repugnant to the mind than "This secret dread, and inward horror Of falling into nought!" How different from all these chilling speculations is the following language of clear, animating, and holy confidence of faith: "We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." SECTION III. PAGAN IDEAS OF FUTURE HAPPINESS WERE GROSS AND FALSE IN THEIR MOST IMPORTANT FEATURES. We have seen that pagans have had some ideas of a future state of happiness we have also seen that these ideas were unsteady, and unsatisfying to them; we now say that those notions of future happiness with which they consoled themselves were always inadequate, and often palpably false, and associated with such other conceptions as are, in the highest degree, gross and repulsive to Christian feelings. As may be seen from the preceding Sections, their conceptions of future felicity were chiefly of an imaginative cast, and, to a great extent, grossly sensual. They bore upon them the impress of those passions and enjoyments from which Christianity proposes to make men entirely free, as the chief qualification for the enjoyment of a pure and perfect bliss in heaven. It was a life into which they should take all their human passions, feelings, desires, and habits, and supposed its chief desirableness to consist in the abundant opportunities it would afford of indulging in all those pleasures in which they here delight. It was a heaven in which there would be, not so much an elevation of the soul's nature, as a full satisfaction of its present desires; in whatever any one placed his chief delight on earth, that he expected to enjoy in the future life to the full. Many of the wisest of the ancient philosophers held that the joys of Elysium were temporary; some, as Virgil, said they would last a thousand years, after which their souls would return again into bodies, such as were suited to their dispositions. If the soul had been good in this world, it would enter the body of such a man or animal as had been characterized by a gentle, amiable, serene, and peaceful disposition. Pythagoras pretended that he had himself passed through a number of bodies, naming the persons in whose bodies his soul had dwelt; and he professed that he had a distinct recollection of this previous existence! The future history of his life, he believed, would be characterized by similar transitions; and this is what this system promised to all. This notion of successive transmigrations, in one form or other, pervaded all the philosophical or poetical conceptions of the East. "A mighty encouragement this to the practice of virtue, that they who applied themselves to it were to have the privilege of animating the bodies of ants and bees, and at the utmost to return to the labors and offices of this mortal life." To some, this idea of transmigrations, in this form, was not satisfactory, and they attempted to improve upon it. Many among the Pythagoreans and Stoics believed that all souls are a part of the Deity, or of the great soul of the world in a pantheistic sense, and that all souls return again into this great Source of souls. Some held that this absorption into the worldsoul would take place immediately at death, and others supposed that it would only be accomplished after one, some said three, thousand years; going, in the mean time, through certain preparatory transmigrations. Some again held that the soul of Divinity in some cases reproduced those souls, after which they would return, either to their own, or to other bodies, to resume again the concerns of this life. Some were of opinion that every soul would have to pass through all terrestrial and marine animals and birds, before this final absorption into Deity could be accomplished. The happiness which they were to enjoy must be before this refusion of their souls into Deity took place, for that would put an end to their personal existence; since in this refusion the soul was just "like a bottle filled with sea-water, which, swimming awhile upon the ocean, does, upon the bottle's breaking, mingle with the common mass." It was in reference to this notion, that the souls lose their separate personal existence, that Seneca said, "Death brings no evil or inconvenience along with it; for that must have an existence which is subject to any inconvenience." Some of the Stoics believed that at certain periods -at the end of the "great year," what they called conflagrations, would take place, at which time every thing would return to its original elements, and with it also the souls of men. Seneca, speaking of this, says, "Those souls which were happy, and had obtained eternal felicity, shall then be involved in the common ruin, and return to the ancient elements." "The opinion of many of the Stoics," says Dr. Leland, "is thus given by Numenius: "The soul is corruptible, but does not die or perish immediately upon its departure from the body, but continues for some time by itself; that which is wise to the dissolution of all things, that of fools for some short time." All this is in the end nothing but |