Thinkers will not be deterred from asking themselves, with all solemnity and in all love of truth, How far is this doctrine of a hell really a revealed truth, or a Platonic speculation, or both? If it is both one and the other, either Plato anticipated Christian Revelation, or Revelation confirmed Plato. Plato, without doubt, did not _invent_ a doctrine which was familiar to the Semitic theology long before him. Still, it may be true that the Platonic theories are totally independent of Jewish traditions, and that the belief in a penal state of existence after death (so clearly developed in the well-known passage of Virgil, _Æn._, vi. 735, _seq._), like that of a last Judgment, had its origin rather in the speculation of mystics, and passed into the popular theology of Christian teachers. The doctrine of retribution for sin (τίσις) may be clearly traced to the Pythagorean dogma δράσαντι παθεῖν, so often insisted upon by Æschylus,--'the doer must suffer.' It was manifest to all, that such suffering was no rule upon earth, since many villains escaped scot-free; and therefore a filling up of the measure hereafter was thought a necessary condition for the sinner. The beneficence of Christianity consisted primarily in this, that it held out a hope that such a debt of suffering could be paid vicariously; whereas the only hope of release held out by Plato (p. 114, A.) was the forgiveness of the persons who had been wronged on earth. This ancient idea of a stern law of reciprocity, 'an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,' is distinctly attributed by Aristotle, who calls it τὸ ἀντιπεπονθὸς, to Pythagoras, Eth. N. V. ch. 8. Be this as it may, it is a very interesting fact that Plato, the first writer of pagan antiquity who describes a bright, supernal heaven, the abode of gods and blessed men who hold converse with them, and a dismal, infernal abode of fire (_Phædo_, p. 110-113,) derives all his imagery in describing the latter from the effects of volcanic outbreaks, to which he even definitely compares it (p. 111, D.) His description of heaven, which in the _Phædrus_ (p. 247, C.) he places far above the sky, the ὑπερουράνιος τόπος, with some reference to the Hesiodic doctrine of a supernal firmament or floor, in the _Phædo_ is a singular compound of the Homeric Olympus and the Elysium and Isles of the Blest in the legends of the earlier poets. Those legends placed Elysium below, and the Isles of the Blest _on_ the earth. Plato's heaven is on the earth indeed, but on a part of it elevated far above the Mediterranean basin, where, he says, men live in a comparatively dim and misty atmosphere. His account suggests the idea that he had heard some tradition of the healthy and prosperous life of the natives on the sunny slopes of the giant Himalaya mountains. But Plato's heaven is also, to a considerable extent, the heaven of the Revelation. Both are described in very materialistic terms. To this day, the popular notion