doctrine rested on a religious basis, and was connected with a sentiment purely religious. In this doctrine there was a noble element of truth--the feeling that man, since he has gone astray, and wandered so far from his God, must needs exert many efforts, and undergo a long and painful pilgrimage before he can rejoin the Source of all perfection;--the firm conviction and positive certainty that nothing defective, impure, or defiled with earthly stains can enter the pure region of perfect spirits, or be eternally united to God; and that thus, before it can attain to this blissful end, the immortal soul must pass through long trials and many purifications. It may now well be conceived, (and indeed the experience of this life would prove it,) that suffering, which deeply pierces the soul, anguish that convulses all the members of existence, may contribute, or may even be necessary, to the deliverance of the soul from all alloy and pollution, as, to borrow a comparison from natural objects, the generous metal is melted down in fire and purged from its dross. It is certainly true that the greater the degeneracy and the degradation of man, the nearer is his approximation to the brute; and when the transmigration of the immortal soul through the bodies of various animals is merely considered as the punishment of its former transgressions, we can very well understand the opinion which supposes that man who, by his crimes and the abuse of his reason, had descended to the level of the brute, should at last be transformed into the brute itself. But what could have given rise to the opinion that the transmigration of souls through the bodies of beasts was the road or channel of amendment, was destined to draw the soul nearer to infinite perfection, and even to accomplish its total union with the Supreme Being, from whom, in all appearance, it seemed calculated to remove it further? And as regards a return to the present state and existence of man, what thinking person would ever wish to return to a life divided and fluctuating as it is, between desire and disgust, wasted in internal and external strife, and which, though brightened by a few scattered rays of truth, is still encompassed with the dense clouds of error;--even though this return to earthly existence should be accomplished in the Brahminical class so highly revered in India, or in the princely and royal race so highly favoured by fortune? There is in all this a strange mixture and confusion of the ideas of this world with those of the next; and how the latter is separated from the former by an impassable gulf, they seem not to have been sufficiently aware. Both these ancient nations, the Egyptians as well as the Indians, regarded with few exceptions, the Metempsychosis, not as an object of joyful hope, but rather as a calamity impending over the soul; and whether they considered it to be a punishment for earthly transgressions, or a state of probation--a severe but preparatory trial