IN all ages of the world, and in all parts of it, mankind have earnestly desired to learn the fate that awaited them when they had “shuffled off this mortal coil;” and those pretending to be their instructors have built up different systems which have stood in the stead of knowledge, and more or less satisfied the bulk of the people. The interest on this subject is, at the present period, in the most highly civilized portions of the globe, less than it has been at any preceding one. The great proportion of us live for this world alone, and think very little of the next: we are in too great a hurry of pleasure or business to bestow any time on a subject of which we have such vague notions—notions so vague, that, in short, we can scarcely by any effort of the imagination bring the idea home to ourselves; and when we are about to die, we are seldom in a situation to do more than resign ourselves to what is inevitable, and blindly meet our fate; while, on the other hand, what is generally called the religious world is so engrossed by its struggles for power and money, or by its sectarian disputes and enmities, and so narrowed and circumscribed by dogmatic orthodoxies, that it has neither inclination nor liberty to turn back or look around, and endeavor to gather up from past records and present observation such hints as are now and again dropped in our path, to give us an intimation of what the truth may be. The rationalistic age, too, out of which we are only just emerging, and which succeeded one of gross superstition, having settled, beyond appeal, that there never was such a thing as a ghost—that the dead never do come back to tell us the secrets of their prison-house, and that nobody believes such idle tales but children and old women—seemed to have shut the door against the only channel through which any information could be sought. Revelation tells us very little on this subject—reason can tell us nothing; and if Nature is equally silent, or if we are to be deterred from questioning her from the fear of ridicule, there is certainly no resource left us but to rest contented in our ignorance, and each wait till the awful secret is disclosed to ourselves.