"Up stepped de debbil Wid his iron wooden shubbil, Tearin' up de yearth wid his big-toe nail!" while to others he is an iconoclastic new thought. Heaven and hell have been treated in every conceivable way in English fiction--conventionally, symbolically, humorously, and satirically, so that one may choose the type he prefers. There are enough kinds to go around. Among the portrayers of the traditional heaven and hell Mrs. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward is prominent. Her works on contemporary immortality are said to have had a tremendous vogue in the period following the Civil War, when death had claimed so many that the living were thinking of the other world more than of this. Her pictures of heaven in _Gates Ajar_ are comforting, for she assures to each person his own dearest wish in fulfillment, to the ambitious youth his books, to the young girl her piano, and to the small child her ginger-snaps instead of earthly bread and butter. In _The Gates Between_ the physician, suddenly killed, finds himself embarrassed by immortality. He doesn't know how to adjust himself to eternity and at first brings many of earth's problems with him. In the third of the series, _The Gates Beyond_, she describes a very material yet spiritual heaven. Bodies are much like those on earth, not vaporous projections; there are museums, hospitals, universities, telephones, concerts and all up-to-date improvements and conveniences. The dead woman discovers that she remembers what she read on earth, takes pleasure in simple things such as the smell of mignonette, hears the birds sing a Te Deum, while a brook and a bird sing a duet, and the leaves are also vocal. There is a Universal Language which must be learned by each soul, and heaven holds all sorts of occupations, material, mental, and spiritual. She says that near earth are many earth-bound spirits occupied in low and coarse and selfish ways, who lack "spiritual momentum to get away." "They loved nothing, lived for nothing, believed in nothing, they cultivated themselves for nothing but the earth,"--which may be compared with the state of the souls on Fifth Avenue, described by Granville Barker. Mrs. Ward's pictures of heaven may seem sentimental and conventional to us to-day, yet to be appreciated they must be considered in relation to the religious thought of her time. She represented a reaction against the rigid theology, the stern concepts of an older generation than her own, and she wished to make heaven more homelike. She did have an influence in her day, as may be illustrated by a remark from a sermon recently delivered by a New York pastor, that the reading of her books had exerted a great influence over him, that they made heaven over for him.