Professor Carpenter's Lecture.

In the fourth lecture of his course which Professor Carpenter delivered in Divinity Chapel last evening, he gave a most interesting account of the beliefs held among the lower races, and the relics of these beliefs seen among more advanced people, as to the abode of departed spirits and the retribution visited to them there.

In the poems which have come down to us from the early races we see that there is a strange confusion between the ideas held as to the future state and the actual usages contemporary with them. This is explained by the fact that men in all time have clung to usages long after the ideas on which they are based have passed away.

One idea which was held among many races was, as seen in a preceding lecture, that the spirit of the dead continued in its earthly dwelling; and all sorts of devices were resorted to in order that the spell of its presence might not remain over the other inmates of the house. The earliest idea of a tomb was that of a house like that occupied by the spirit in life and which was to be its permanent domicile. Among people who lived in caves, burial was made underground. Thus grew up the ideas of the nether world which are shown in the word hell, which means "the hidden." Some people buried their dead in mounds and barrows and some on hill-tops which were consequently believed to be peopled with spirits. Probably the latter custom was not without influence in forming the idea of a heaven above. A very prevalent belief was that of a migration of the dead, along a river or beyond a sea, usually to the East or West; for men of imaginative natures standing on the shore of the ocean could see in the brilliant clouds of sunset and dawn, the capes and headlands of a fair land beyond. These beliefs may well be seen in some ancient Irish literature and in Procopius's description of the spirits' voyage to Brittia.

Among the races whose ideas are being considered it was believed that the spirit possessed a form similar to the earthly body with all its attendant needs of food, fire, clothing and the like. Social relations were not thought to change in the spirit world and Job's conception of a place where "the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest" was by no means common among people of the lower cultus. A striking example of the idea of continuance was found in the Fiji Islands, where a son, through the highest motives of filial duty, put his own mother to death when her strength and vigor were yet unimpaired, in order that she might enter the spirit life in full possession of her bodily faculties.

The spirits were supposed to feel, but more intensely, the same emotions that they felt in life. There was an idea of reward and retribution, but in most cases it considered only the attainment of that first of savage virtues, namely, courage, though sometimes obedience to the will of the gods was thought to meet with a recompense. In Mexico there was a highly organized system which provided three separate destinies according to the way in which death was caused.