damned. Yet these joys and terrors seem hardly to exercise an appreciable
influence over the lives of men. The wicked man when old, is not, as Plato
supposes (Republic), more agitated by the terrors of another world when he
is nearer to them, nor the good in an ecstasy at the joys of which he is
soon to be the partaker. Age numbs the sense of both worlds; and the habit
of life is strongest in death. Even the dying mother is dreaming of her
lost children as they were forty or fifty years before, 'pattering over the
boards,' not of reunion with them in another state of being. Most persons
when the last hour comes are resigned to the order of nature and the will
of God. They are not thinking of Dante's Inferno or Paradiso, or of the
Pilgrim's Progress. Heaven and hell are not realities to them, but words
or ideas; the outward symbols of some great mystery, they hardly know what.
Many noble poems and pictures have been suggested by the traditional
representations of them, which have been fixed in forms of art and can no
longer be altered. Many sermons have been filled with descriptions of
celestial or infernal mansions. But hardly even in childhood did the
thought of heaven and hell supply the motives of our actions, or at any
time seriously affect the substance of our belief.

8. Another life must be described, if at all, in forms of thought and not
of sense. To draw pictures of heaven and hell, whether in the language of
Scripture or any other, adds nothing to our real knowledge, but may perhaps
disguise our ignorance. The truest conception which we can form of a
future life is a state of progress or education--a progress from evil to
good, from ignorance to knowledge. To this we are led by the analogy of
the present life, in which we see different races and nations of men, and
different men and women of the same nation, in various states or stages of
cultivation; some more and some less developed, and all of them capable of
improvement under favourable circumstances. There are punishments too of
children when they are growing up inflicted by their parents, of elder