He has been as active as the next man since his arrival in ghostdom. He has peeped under the _chapeaux_ of every solemn pilgrim whom he has passed, but failed to find the four-and-twenty elders who have washed their robes in the blood of the Lamb. What has he found? He really is ashamed to own up to the number of mountain sides and sloping hills he has inspected in the vain search for a place he used to call h---- (he thought it blasphemy to add the other three letters); but neither cloven foot, nor forked tail, nor horns, nor any kind of fearful person in black, has pounced upon him; nor has he been seized by any claimant for leaving the world unshriven, as he did. Poor Will Thackeray! it has been a great disappointment to him! He expected some kind of sensational reception--thunder or lightning, or some big God whose towering front might vie with Chimborazo--to awe him into the consideration that he had become a spirit and was launched into the awful precincts of eternity! No wonder he feels dogged and put upon to find himself thus bamboozled! He undertook a long and venturesome journey to “see the elephant,” but it wasn’t there! He can’t complain against the citizens of this famous “undiscovered bourne”; they have done all that’s fair and square by him; they have shown all that they have got; and he is too much of a gentleman to taunt them. He knows they feel ashamed that they haven’t those curiosities that their Vicegerents on earth had vouched for their having; he can see it in their faces; but he considers himself in duty bound to prepare his fellow-citizens for what they are to expect. ARCHBISHOP HUGHES. _TWO NATURAL RELIGIONS_. There are two great natural religions before the world, the Roman Catholic and the Spiritualistic; and both are adapted to the wants of the race. Man naturally gives expression to his thoughts by external forms corresponding to his ideas. The Roman Catholic religion is accused of being a system of forms and ceremonies, but therein lies its wonderful adaptation to humanity. Thought ever seeks expression in form, even as a mother’s love for her infant finds expression in her ardent embrace. Love is the prevailing element of the Catholic religion, as shown by the love of the Son of God for poor, ignorant, sinful creatures. We do not present this to the mind ideally. We call in the outcast and the beggar, and we expose to their view, in the great cathedrals, the Son of God, as he appeared in all his various experiences of human life. The parent who can earn but a scanty pittance for his offspring, sees before him Jesus lying in the manger, equal in squalid poverty with the lowest of mankind. The majesty and glory of the courts of Heaven are symbolized in the Roman Church. _There_ is gathered the wealth of the world! All that is yet attained in the representation of the grand, the beautiful, the majestic, the sublime, and the devotional, is collected in the Mother of Churches.