THE BELIEF IN IMMORTALITY HAS BEEN MADE A CURSE.--This belief, so full of delight and rainbowed with anticipations, has been made, from the dawn of man’s religious nature, the means of inflicting unspeakable tortures, both of mind and body. Selfishness thrust the priest between man and the invisible world of spirit, and made immortality the instrument wherewith it could rule with diabolical despotism over mankind. Even when the rain-maker shook his rattling calabash at the sky, and beseeched the moisture-giving clouds to send down rain, the priestly order had fast hold on the superstitious savage; and in all the transformations of history, surging with the coming and going of countless generations and the ebb and flow of empires, never for a moment has this grip been loosened. The power of the temporal ruler has been second to that of the class who held the keys of life beyond the grave. What if the king could cast into a dungeon, condemn to the cross or the flames? That were pain for a moment, or, at most, for the few years of this life; and of what insignificance these short years, or the most terrible tortures human ingenuity could invent, to the infinite tortures extending through an eternal existence? Pharaoh might command Egypt to-day, but, to-night, his spirit would be summoned before the tribunal of the Dead; and those austere priestly judges would decide whether he be cast to the crocodiles of the Nile to become extinct, or again, clad in his mummified body, resurrected and purified, a companion of the gods. What a position for an ignorant man! Immortality is the Promethean curse, enabling the vultures to inflict never-ending torments. The sweetest boon is oblivion, and that is denied. The sun may fade from the heavens and the stars cease to shine; but the spirit can not escape its doom, and will not have experienced even then the first pangs of its sufferings. Is it strange that men went wild with this dreadful belief? Ignorant men, who feared the unseen, intangible spirits of the air more than the accumulated tortures that human ruler might inflict, saw in the priests who claimed the power to control this intangible world, who held the keys of the Great Unseen, the only hope of escape. How well that order has seized its vantage, and, fanning the flames of superstition, stifled reason and led poor Humanity over the quaking bog-lands and reeking marshes of myth-theology!