Some traveller or poet tells him fabulous tales of a bird which, grown aged, fills its nest with spices, and, spontaneously burning, soars from the aromatic fire, rejuvenescent for a thousand years; and he cannot but take the phoenix for a miraculous type of his own soul springing, free and eternal, from the ashes of his corpse. Having watched the silkworm, as it wove its cocoon and lay down in its oblong grave apparently dead, until at length it struggles forth, glittering with rainbow colors, a winged moth, endowed with new faculties and living a new life in a new sphere, he conceives that so the human soul may, in the fulness of time, disentangle itself from the imprisoning meshes of this world of larva, a thing of spirit beauty, to sail through heavenly airs; and henceforth he engraves a butterfly on the tombstone in vivid prophecy of immortality. Thus a moralizing observation of natural similitudes teaches man to hope for an existence beyond death. Thirdly, the prevailing belief in a future life is spread and upheld by the influence of authority. The doctrine of the soul's survival and transference to another world, where its experience depends on conditions observed or violated here, conditions somewhat within the control of a select class of men here, such a doctrine is the very hiding place of the power of priest craft, a vast engine of interest and sway which the shrewd insight of priesthoods has often devised and the cunning policy of states subsidized. In most cases of this kind the asserted doctrine is placed on the basis of a divine revelation, and must be implicitly received. God proclaims it through his anointed ministers: therefore, to doubt it or logically criticize it is a crime. History bears witness to such a procedure wherever an organized priesthood has flourished, from primeval pagan India to modern papal Rome. It is traceable from the dark Osirian shrines of Egypt and the initiating temple at Eleusis to the funeral fires of Gaul and the Druidic conclave in the oak groves of Mona; from the reeking altars of Mexico in the time of Montezuma to the masses for souls in Purgatory said this day in half the churches of Christendom. Much of the popular faith in immortality which has prevailed in all ages has been owing to the authority of its promulgators, a deep and honest trust on the part of the people in the authoritative dicta of their religious teachers.