In the theories of a future state, as devised by the lower races, we are at a loss to detect the germs of any more spiritual longings. Far from looking forward with pleased anticipation or confidence to the world to come, the barbarian shuddered as he thought of his approaching end, and was loath to exchange the white and sunny world for the dreary companionship of luckless shades. The life that awaited him was not in the majority of instances a better or a higher life than this; not free from the limitations of sense; no larger perfecting of what is here dwarfed and crippled; it was lower, poorer, meaner; it was to the present, what the pressed flower is to the full-blown rose; the same in substance, indeed, but with its beauty perished, and its joyous fragrance evanesced. The argument from the common consent of mankind in truth deserves no serious attention.* * The doctrine of spiritual immortality is not common to the human race. The material life of the ghost bears no analogy to what we mean by the soul's continuance. The continuance of the ghost's existence is not an immortal continuance. The argument cannot be substantiated, it would prove nothing, if it could. The general concurrence of the whole human race in any form of error would not make that error less erroneous, and the testimony of united millions against a solitary thinker might kick the beam when balanced in the scales of truth. When we behold an ignorant knave squandering his ill-gotten gains on superfluities, while honest people are famishing for want of the necessaries; when we see the unscrupulous politician outstripping the deserving statesman, in the race for fame and station; when modest merit shrinks in corners, and the native royalty of talent plays courtier to the kings of lucre, we are reminded of the complaint of Job, that the bad prosper, and the righteous are down-trodden, yet that they sleep together in the dust and the worm covers them alike. This evident disparity between virtue and happiness has led men to take refuge in the thought of compensation hereafter, and the necessity of a future state in which the good shall be rewarded, and the evil punished, according to the verdict of a just judge, has been deduced even from the apparent injustice of the present. Thus the very imperfections of our own life on earth, afford a pretext for the most ambitious conceptions of human destiny. The argument from the necessity of reward and punishment is extremely popular among the uneducated, since it appeals ostensibly to their sense of justice and assures them that by the aid of Divine omnipotence, a full correspondence between worthiness and happiness, though vainly expected here, will be established in another sphere. It behooves us to enquire whether there is anything in the nature of virtue, that demands a correspondence of this kind.