It must be confessed, that the popular belief of departed spirits occasionally holding a communication with the human race, is replete with matter of curious speculation. Some Christian divines, with every just reason, acknowledge no authentic source whence the impression of a future state could ever have been communicated to man, but from the Jewish prophets or from our Saviour himself. Yet it is certain, that a belief in our existence after death has, from time immemorial, prevailed in countries, to which the knowledge of the gospel could never have extended, as among certain tribes of America. Can then this notion have been intuitively suggested? Or is it an extravagant supposition, that the belief might often have arisen from those spectral illusions, to which men in every age, from the occasional influence of morbific causes, must have been subject? And what would have been the natural self-persuasion, if a savage saw before him the apparition of a departed friend or acquaintance, endowed with the semblance of life, with motion, and with signs of mental intelligence, perhaps even holding a converse with him? Assuredly, the conviction would scarcely fail to arise of an existence after death. The pages of history attest the fact that:— “If ancestry can be in aught believ’d, Descending spirits have convers’d with man, And told him secrets of the world unknown.” But if this opinion of a life hereafter, had ever among heathen nations their origin, it must necessarily be imbued with the grossest absurdities, incidental to so fallacious a source of intelligence. Yet still the mind has clung to such extravagancies with avidity; “for,” as Sir Thomas Brown has remarked, “it is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him that he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no future state to come, unto which this seems progressively and otherwise made in vain.” It has remained therefore for the light of revelation alone, to impart to this belief the consistency and conformation of divine truth, and to connect it with a rational system of rewards and punishments.