but, as the body _must_ be consumed, were it not better and safer, as the Greeks did, to _burn_ the dead, to resolve the corpse, as soon as possible, into its constituent elements. I shall ever remember with horror the scenes which I witnessed in Naples, when a _pile of bodies_, collected from the chapels by the dead carts, which go round the city at night, was thrown by irreverent hands into the public cemetery of the Campo Santo. The fiat of the Creator MAY at once produce a reconstruction of the body, however widely scattered its particles, and the return of the soul to the brain, from which it had once departed; but is it not somewhat irrational to think that we should again be endowed with organs, without the functions and passions to which they are subservient? IDA. It may be a bliss to gaze even on the _shadows_ of those we love. There is a beautiful allegory of this solemn question told in the “Spectator,” which, as Addison approves, it cannot be profanation to admire. It is the Indian legend of “Marraton and Yaratilda,” in which the devoted husband comes unawares on Paradise, and sees the shadowy _forms_ of his wife and children, without their _substance_. The story exquisitely blends the fond wish of Marraton to die, that he may be again admitted to the holy communion of those so fondly loved; for Paradise is painted in the mind’s eye even of the heathen, although, in his dearth of revelation, he associates the joys of his elysium with the sensual pleasures of terrestrial life. The Indian dreams of his dogs, believing that the greatest hunters shall be in the highest favour with Brahma; the proselytes of the prophet die in a vision of their houri’s beauty; and the warriors of Odin already drink the honey-water from the skulls of their enemies, served up to them by the beautiful “Valkhas” of the “Valhalla.” Thus even the creed of infidels is not atheism. What thinks Evelyn? EV. As you do, Ida. As to the atheist, one, perchance, may have _lived_, if we rightly interpret the sentiments of Diogenes, and Bion, and Lucian, and Voltaire; but, I believe, one never _died_. My solemn duty has summoned me to the death-bed of more than one reputed infidel, who have in health reasoned with fluency and splendour, and have penned abstruse theses on life and the world’s creation. But, when danger lay in their path of life, their stoic heroism fled, and left them abject cowards. They looked not even on the lightning’s flash without trembling, and the vision of death was a sting to the conscience. I have seen many a death-bed like that of Beaufort, who made “no signal of his hope,” not because he disbelieved a God, but because a conviction of his sin left him without a hope and faith in the promises. Of course there cannot be an _Euthanasia_ where irreligion has marked a life, but, believe me, there would be no _fear_ of death in an atheist.