Well, then, supposing this being to exist somewhere—and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the souls of the inhabitants of each planet continue to hover within the sphere of that planet, to which, for anything we can tell, they may be attached by a magnetic attraction—supposing it to find itself in space, free of the body, endowed with the memory of the past, and consequently with a consciousness of its own deserts, able to perceive that which we do not ordinarily perceive, namely, those who have passed into a similar state with itself—will it not naturally seek its place among those spirits which most resemble itself, and with whom, therefore, it must have the most affinity? On earth, the good seek the good, and the wicked the wicked: and the axiom that “like associates with like,” we can not doubt will be as true hereafter as now. “In my Father’s house there are many mansions,” and our intuitive sense of what is fit and just must needs assure us that this is so. There are too many degrees of moral worth and of moral unworth among mankind, to permit of our supposing that justice could be satisfied by an abrupt division into two opposite classes. On the contrary, there must be infinite shades of desert; and, as we must consider that that which a spirit enters into on leaving the body is not so much a _place_ as a _condition_, so there must be as many degrees of happiness or suffering as there are individuals, each carrying with him his own heaven or hell. For it is a vulgar notion to imagine that heaven and hell are _places_; they are states; and it is in ourselves we must look for both. When we leave the body, we carry them with us: “As the tree falls, so it shall lie.” The soul which here has wallowed in wickedness or been sunk in sensuality, will not be suddenly purified by the death of the body: its moral condition remains what its earthly sojourn has trained it to, but its means of indulging its propensities are lost. If it has had no godly aspirations here, it will not be drawn to God there; and if it has so bound itself to the body that it has known no happiness but that to which the body ministered, it will be incapable of happiness when deprived of that enjoyment. Here we see at once what a variety of conditions must necessarily ensue—how many comparatively negative states there must be between those of positive happiness or positive misery!