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origin of their embalmings and their pyramids. This I myself formerly believed. Some said, that the resurrection was to take place at the end of a thousand years; others, at the end of three thousand. This difference in their theological opinions seems to prove, that they were not very sure about the matter.

Besides, in the history of Egypt, we find no man raised again; but among the Greeks we find several. Among the latter then we must look for this invention of rising again.

But the Greeks often burned their bodies, and the Egyptians embalmed them, that when the soul, which was a small aërial figure, returned to its habitation, it might find it quite ready. This had been good if its organs had also been ready; but the embalmer began by taking out the brain and clearing the entrails. How were men to rise again without intestines and without the medullary part by means of which they think? Where were they to find again the blood, the lymph, and other humours?

You will tell me that it was still more difficult to rise again among the Greeks, where there was not left of you more than a pound of ashes at the utmostmingled too with the ashes of wood, stuffs, and spices.

Your objection is forcible, and I hold with you, that resurrection is a very extraordinary thing; but the son of Mercury did not the less die and rise again several times. The gods restored Pelops to life, although he had been served up as a ragout, and Ceres had eaten one of his shoulders. You know that Esculapius brought Hippolytus to life again; this was a verified fact, of which even the most incredulous had no doubt; the name of 'Virbius,' given to Hippolytus, was a convincing proof. Hercules had resuscitated Alceste and Pirithous. Heres did, it is true (according to Plato), come to life again for fifteen days only; still it was a resurrection; the time does not alter the fact.

Many grave schoolmen clearly see purgatory and resurrection in Virgil. As for purgatory, I am obliged to

acknowledge that it is expressly in the sixth book. This may displease the protestants, but I have no alternative:

Non tamen omne malum miseris, nec funditàs omnes
Corporea excedunt pestes, &c.

Not death itself can wholly wash their stains;
But long contracted filth even in the soul remains.
The relics of inveterate vice they wear,

And spots of sin obscene in every face appear, &c.

But we have already quoted this passage in the article PURGATORY, which doctrine is here expressed clearly enough; nor could the kinsfolks of that day obtain from the pagan priests an indulgence to abridge their sufferings for ready money. The ancients were much more severe and less simoniacal than we are, notwithstanding that they imputed so many foolish actions to their gods. What would you have? Their theology was made up of contradictions, as the malignant say is the case with our own.

When their purgation was finished these souls went and drank of the waters of Lethe, and instantly asked that they might enter fresh bodies and again see daylight. But is this a resurrection? Not at all; it is taking an entirely new body, not resuming the old one; it is a metempsychosis, without any relation to the manner in which we of the true faith are to rise again.

The souls of the ancients did, I must acknowledge, make a very bad bargain in coming back to this world for seventy years at most to undergo once more all that we know is undergone in a life of seventy years, and then suffer another thousand years' discipline. In my humble opinion, there is no soul that would not be tired of this everlasting vicissitude of so short a life and so long a penance.

SECTION IV.

Every man will

Resurrection of the Moderns. Our resurrection is quite different. appear with precisely the same body before; and all these bodies will be

which he had burned for all

eternity, excepting only, at most, one in an hundred thousand. This is much worse than a purgatory of ten centuries, in order to live here again a few years.

When will the great day of this general resurrection arrive? This is not positively known; and the learned are much divided. Nor do they any more know how each one is to find his own members again. Hereupon they start many difficulties.

1. Our body, say they, is, during life, undergoing a continual change; at fifty years of age, we have nothing of the body in which our soul was lodged at twenty.

2. A soldier from Brittany goes into Canada: there, by a very common chance, he finds himself short of food, and is forced to eat an Iroquois, whom he killed the day before. This Iroquois had fed on jesuits for two or three months; great part of his body had become jesuit. Here then, the body of a soldier is composed of Iroquois, of jesuits, and of all that he had eaten before. How is each to take again precisely what belongs to him? and which part belongs to each?

3. A child dies in its mother's womb, just at the moment that it has received a soul. Will it rise again

fœtus, or boy, or man?

4. To rise again-to be the same person as you were you must have your memory perfectly fresh and present; it is memory that makes your identity. If your memory be lost, how will you be the same man?

6. There are only a certain number of earthly particles that can constitute an animal. Sand, stone, minerals, metals, contribute nothing. All earth is not adapted thereto : it is only the soils favourable to vegetation that are favourable to the animal species. When, after the lapse of many ages, every one is to rise again, where shall be found the earth adapted to the formation of all these bodies?

7. Suppose an island, the vegetative part of which will suffice for a thousand men, and for five or six thousand animals to feed and labour for that thousand men : at the end of an hundred thousand generations, we shall

have to raise again a thousand millions of men. It is clear that matter will be wanting :

Materies opus est, ut crescant postera sæcla.

8. And lastly, when it is proved, or thought to be proved, that a miracle as great as the universal deluge, or the ten plagues of Egypt, will be necessary to work the resurrection of all mankind in the valley of Jehosaphat, it is asked-What becomes of the souls of all these bodies while awaiting the moment of returning into their cases?

Fifty rather knotty questions might easily be put; but the doctors would likewise easily find answers to them all.

RIGHTS.

SECTION I.

National Rights-Natural Rights-Public Rights.

I KNOW no better way of commencing this subject than with the verses of Ariosto, in the second stanza of the 44th Canto of the Orlando Furioso, which observes, that kings, emperors, and popes sign fine treaties one day which they break the next, and that whatever piety they may affect, the only god whom they really appeal to, is their interest:

Fan lega oggi re, papi et imperatori
Doman saran nimici capitali:
Perche, qual l'apparenze esteriori,

Non hanno i cor, non han gli animi tali,

Che non mirando al torto più che al dritto.
Attendon solamente al lor profitto.

If there were only two men on earth, how would they live together? They would assist one another; they would annoy one another; they would court one another; they would speak ill of one another; fight with one another; be reconciled to one another; and be neither able to live with nor without one another. In short, they would do as people at present do, who possess the gift of reason certainly, but the gift of instinct also; and will feel, reason, and act for ever as nature has destined.

No god has descended upon our globe, assembled the human race, and said to them, "I ordain that the Negroes and Caffres go stark naked, and feed upon insects.

"I order the Samoyeds to clothe themselves with the skins of rein deer, and to feed upon their flesh, insipid as it is, and eat dry and half putrescent fish without salt. It is my will, that the Tartars of Thibet all believe what their dalai-lama shall say; and that the Japanese pay the same attention to their dairo.

"The Arabs are not to eat swine, and the Westphalians nothing else but swine.

"I have drawn a line from Mount Caucasus to Egypt, and from Egypt to Mount Atlas. All who inhabit the east of that line may espouse as many women as they please; those to the west of it must be satisfied with one.

"If towards the Adriatic gulph, or the marshes of the Rhine and the Meuse, or in the neighbourhood of Mount Jura, or the Isle of Albion, any one shall wish to make another despotic, or aspire to be so himself, let his head be cut off, on a full conviction that destiny and myself are opposed to his intentions.

"Should any one be so insolent as to attempt to establish an assembly of free men on the banks of the Manzanares, or on the shores of the Propontis, let him be impaled alive or drawn asunder by four horses.

"Whoever shall make up his accounts according to a certain rule of arithmetic at Constantinople, at Grand Cairo, at Tafilet, at Delhi, or at Adrianople, let him be impaled alive on the spot, without form of law; and whoever shall dare to account by any other rule at Lisbon, Madrid, in Champagne, in Picardy, and towards the Danube, from Ulm unto Belgrade, let him be devoutly burned amidst chauntings of the 'Miserere.'

"That which is just along the shores of the Loire, is otherwise on the banks of the Thames; for my laws are universal, &c. &c."

It must be confessed, that we have no very clear proof, even in the Journal Cretian,' nor in 'The Key to the Cabinet of Princes,' that a god has descended in

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