Now, if we admit the probability of this middle state, we have removed one of the great objections which are made to the belief in the reappearance of the dead: namely, that the blest are too happy to return to the earth, and that the wicked have it not in their power to do so. This difficulty arises, however, very much from the material ideas entertained of heaven and hell—the notion that they are places instead of states. I am told that the Greek word _hades_ is derived from _æides_, _invisible_; and that the Hebrew word _scheôl_, which has the same signification, also implies a state, not a place, since it may be interpreted into _desiring_, _longing_, _asking_, _praying_. These words in the Septuagint are translated _grave_, _death_, and _hell_; but previously to the Reformation they seem to have borne their original meaning—that is, the state into which the soul entered at the death of the body. It was probably to get rid of the purgatory of the Roman Church, which had doubtless become the source of many absurd notions and corrupt practices, that the doctrine of a middle state or hades was set aside: besides which, the honest desire for reformation, in all reforming churches, being alloyed by the _odium theologicum_, the purifying besom is apt to take too discursive a sweep, exercising less modesty and discrimination than might be desirable, and thus not uncommonly wiping away truth and falsehood together. Dismissing the idea, therefore, that heaven and hell are places in which the soul is imprisoned, whether in bliss or woe, and supposing that, by a magnetic relation, it may remain connected with the sphere to which it previously belonged, we may easily conceive that, if it have the memory of the past, the more entirely sensuous its life in the body may have been, the closer it will cling to the scene of its former joys; or even if its sojourn on earth were not a period of joy, but the contrary, still, if it have no heavenward aspirations, it will find itself, if not in actual wo, yet aimless, objectless, and out of a congenial element. It has no longer the organs whereby it perceived, communicated with, and enjoyed, the material world and its pleasures. The joys of heaven are not its joys; we might as well expect a hardened prisoner in Newgate, associating with others as hardened as himself, to melt into ecstatic delight at the idea of that which he can not apprehend! How helpless and inefficient such a condition seems! and how natural it is to us to imagine that, under such circumstances, there might be awakened a considerable desire to manifest itself to those yet living in the flesh, if such a manifestation be possible! And what right have we, in direct contradiction to all tradition, to assert that it is not? We may raise up a variety of objections from physical science, but we can not be sure that these are applicable to the case; and of the laws of spirit we know very little, since we are only acquainted with it as circumscribed,