Although revelation has given us glimpses, enough to satisfy humble devotion, what mind can _decide_ on the exact nature and changes of its own future state? The negative answer is at once returned by the variety of these learned opinions:—That the soul is, immediately after death, submitted to its reward or punishment;—That its state after death is one of _half_ happiness or misery, until it be again joined to its body on the resurrection; and then it shall enjoy or suffer the _extremes_ of felicity or torment;—That the soul rests in quiet unconsciousness until the day of judgment;—And lastly, that souls are purified by purgatory and comparative suffering, and _then_ are admitted into the realms of perpetual enjoyment. ASTR. Is it not strange that in this notion of purgatory, with slight variations, pagans, and Romanists, and Egyptians, and Brahmins, so nearly accord? In the creed of the Brahmins, there is something of sublimity, whatever may be their error, and Ida will not chide, if I repeat the essence of their creed, which Robertson has gathered from the “Baghvat Geeta.” “Every intelligent nature, particularly the souls of men, they conceived to be portions separated from this great spirit; to which, after fulfilling their destiny on earth, and attaining a proper degree of purity, they would be again reunited. In order to efface the stains with which a soul, during its residence on earth, has been defiled by the indulgence of sensual and corrupt appetites, they taught that it must pass, in a long succession of transmigrations, through the bodies of different animals, until, by what it suffers and what it leaves in the various forms of its existence, it shall be so thoroughly refined from all pollution, as to be rendered meet for being absorbed into the divine essence, and returns, like a drop, into that unbounded ocean from which it originally issued.” Aristotle, in taking up this notion of transmigration in his book “De Animâ,” says that “the soul was always joined to a body, sometimes to one, sometimes to another.” And from this idea were taken the stories of Fadlallah and the Dervis, in the “Spectator,” of the “Transmigrations of Indus,” and the beautiful fable of “Psyche,” or the soul, which when a body died, could not live _alone_ on earth, and so crept into another. Herodotus, in the second book of his history, has some allusions to the Egyptian creed; and, indeed, the fear of this transmigration was the origin of mummies among the Copts. Their belief that the soul (the immortality of which they very early, if not the first, decided,) could not leave the body when _entire_, induced them to preserve that body as long as possible; and the mummy unrollers and hieroglyphic readers must commit sad sacrilege, by exposing their sacred dust to the decomposition of air.