According to the Danish missionaries, the souls of those who are untimely slain wander about as diabolical spectres, doing evil to mankind, and possessing those whom they persecute.--NIECAMP. i. 10. § 14. The inhabitants of the hills near Rajamahall believe, that when God sends a messenger to summon a person to his presence, if the messenger should mistake his object, and carry off another, he is desired by the Deity to take him away; but as the earthly mansion of his soul must be decayed, it is destined to remain mid-way between heaven and earth, and never can return to the presence of God. Whoever commits homicide without a divine order, and whoever is killed by a snake, as a punishment for some concealed crime, will be doomed to the same state of wandering; and whoever hangs himself will wander eternally with a rope about his neck.--_Asiat. Researches_. Pope Benedict XII. drew up a list of 117 heretical opinions held by the Armenian Christians, which he sent to the king of Armenia,--instead of any other assistance, {146} when that prince applied to him for aid against the Mahomedans. This paper was first published by Bernino, and exhibits a curious mixture of mythologies. One of their opinions was, that the souls of the adult wander about in the air till the day of judgment; neither hell, nor the heavenly, nor the terrestrial paradise, being open to them till that day shall have past. Davenant, in one of his plays, speculates upon such a state of wandering as the lot of the soul after death:-- I must to darkness go, hover in clouds, Or in remote untroubled air, silent As thoughts, or what is uncreated yet; Or I must rest in some cold shade, and shall Perhaps ne'er see that everlasting spring Of which philosophy so long has dreamt, And seems rather to wish than understand. _Love and Honour._ I know no other author who has so often expressed to those who could understand him, his doubts respecting a future state, and how burthensome he felt them. _But I, all naked feeling and raw life_.--II. p. 13. By the vital souls of those men who have committed {147} sins in the body, another body, composed of _nerves_, with five sensations, in order to be susceptible of torment, shall certainly be assumed after death; and being intimately united with those minute nervous particles, according to their distribution, they shall feel in that new body the pangs inflicted in each case by the sentence of Yama.--_Inst. of Menu_. Henry More, the Platonist, has two applicable stanzas in his Song of the Soul:--