Self-Existent, the 'immortal and spotless,' who 'lies enveloped in matter and is the dwelling of all living creatures,' who is, 'like a city, divided into many streets.' Here and there they express themselves on this topic in language of much sublimity.

I shall have occasion to explain in the next chapter that one particular religious system of the greatest antiquity which is shadowed forth in these books stands quite apart from the beliefs which I have been examining. It is very probable that these beliefs were themselves compounded of divers more ancient parts, and that direct reward or punishment, and indirect reward or punishment by transmigration, did not originally belong to the same body of doctrine. Heaven and Hell and the Transmigration of Souls are, however, all referred to in the oldest of the law treatises, though briefly and slightly. In the more recent writings (some of them, however, not so modern as Manu) these subjects occupy a great space, and have been vastly amplified by gloomy and fantastic imagination. Heaven, as is not unusual in religious systems, is but faintly sketched; but the Hells, or, as they would more properly be called, the Purgatories (since they are essentially transient), are described with the utmost minuteness of detail. They are twenty-two in number, each applying a new variety of physical or moral pain. It would be a mistake, I think, to suppose that they were created

by a single imaginative effort, like the circles of Dante's Inferno. They rather belong to widely separated grades of the conception of punishment. Such places of retribution as the twenty-first of these Purgatories, where souls wander in sword-leaved forests; the nineteenth, where they stray over rough and uneven roads; the fifteenth, where they sink in stinking clay, are probably much older than the first, or place of darkness; the fourth, or place of howling ; or the places of burning, parching, and pressing together, which stand tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. These last seem to me not older than the infliction of regular (but originally very cruel) criminal punishments by civil rulers possessing organised authority. The torture chambers of princes have very strongly influenced the conception of posthumous punishment, as may be seen by comparing what remains of some of them-for example, of that in the free city of Nuremberg-with a picture in which some painter of the fourteenth century gives form to the popular ideas concerning Purgatory and Hell.

The sojourn of the sinful soul in each of these places of punishment is, as I have said, always terminable, but its length is expressed in language suited to astronomical magnitudes. If, for example, a Brahman be slain, as many as are the pellets of dust which his blood makes on the soil-that is to say, on the burnt-up soil of India-so many are the periods of a thousand years

the slayer must pass in Hell (Manu, xI. 208). The duration of punishment is imagined by the Buddhists with even greater extravagance; and indeed on all these subjects they seem to have outdone the doctrine of the Hindus. The frightful Buddhist pictures of torments in hell are tolerably well known. They are mostly of Chinese origin, and probably exaggerate (but do not more than exaggerate) the criminal justice administered from time immemorial in the great organised Chinese Empire and its dependent kingdoms, in which the highest importance seems always to have been attached to the deterrent effects of punishment.

The series of Purgatories is, however, at last worked through, and the soul or portion of life emerges to begin a course of transmigration which may bring it again to humanity. I have already stated my opinion that the purgation of sin or impurity by transmigration, and its purgation by punishment in hell, did not originally belong to the same system of religious thought. But in these Hindu law-books they are blended together; and the sinful spirit, released from purgatorial pains, has still to pass through a succession of animal or vegetable forms before it is again clothed with a human body. It is hard not to smile at the grotesque particularity of detail with which such writers as Vishnu and Manu depict the transmigration of souls. Criminals in the highest degree enter the bodies

D

of all plants successively. Mortal sinners enter the bodies of worms or insects. Minor offenders enter the bodies of birds. Criminals in the fourth degree enter the bodies of aquatic animals. Those who had committed a crime affecting loss of caste enter the bodies of amphibious animals' (Vishnu, XLIV. 2). These general statements are followed by a prodigious number of others, mentioning the class of creature into which particular sinners enter. There is perhaps a natural fitness in some of them, but others look like arbitrary assertions or wild One who has appropriated a broad passage guesses. becomes a serpent living in

stolen grain becomes a rat. becomes a rat. water becomes a water-fowl.

holes. One who has

One who has stolen

But what is to be said

of the transformation of the stealer of silk into a partridge; of the thief of linen into a frog; of the cattlestealer into an iguana? I may venture at the same time to suggest that what seems to us most difficult to understand in these beliefs once appeared simple and natural. It has been observed that savages look upon the transmutation of one creature into another as almost an easy, everyday process. Primitive men, living constantly in the presence of wild animals, preying on them and preyed upon by them, do not seem to have been struck by the immense superiority of the man to the brute. They appear to have been impressed by the difference between living

things and everything else, but to have considered the forms of animate being as separated from one another by a very slight barrier. Some very interesting inferences have recently been drawn from this savage characteristic; and it has been pointed out how in those survivals of a very ancient world, fairy tales and myths, one creature is constantly changing into another, and slipping back into its original shape. The most popular child's book of our day is a story of metamorphosis; but that story of Wonderland owes its popularity to its faithfully following the operations of a dream; and one must here remark that much of the material of ancient superstition is literally such stuff as dreams are made of.

But these Hindu law-books have wrought up the ancient belief into a moral and theological philosophy of the greatest precision and amplitude. Their special principle is that man's acts and experiences in one form of being determine the next. Whether he will in a future existence become a plant, a reptile, a bird, a woman, a Brahman, or a semi-divine sage, depends on himself. He goes out of the world what his own deeds have made him; and the impossibility of dissociating the past from the future is declared by these writers in language of much solemnity. If a man departs modified by voluntary sinfulness or involuntary impurity, and if he has not expelled the taint by due penance, he will become one of the lowest