THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 211 



an inexhaustible supply of bears, seals, and other 

 polar animals ; the effeminate Cingalese frames his 

 Paradise on the wonderful island-paradise of Ceylon 

 with its noble gardens and forests — adding that there 

 will be unlimited supplies of rice and curry, of cocoa- 

 nuts and other fruit, always at hand ; the Moham- 

 medan Arab believes it will be a place of shady 

 gardens of flowers, watered by cool springs, and filled 

 with lovely maidens ; the Catholic fisherman of Sicily 

 looks forward to a daily superabundance of the most 

 valuable fishes and the finest maccaroni, and eternal 

 absolution for all his sins, which he can go on 

 committing in his eternal home ; the evangelical of 

 North Europe longs for an immense Gothic cathedral, 

 in which he can chant the praises of the Lord of 

 Hosts for all eternity. In a word, each believer 

 really expects his eternal life to be a direct continua- 

 tion of his individual life on earth, only in a " much 

 improved and enlarged edition." 



We must lay special stress on the thoroughly 

 materialistic character of Christian athanatism, which 

 is closely connected with the absurd dogma of the 

 " resurrection of the body." As thousands of paintings 

 of famous masters inform us, the bodies that have 

 risen again, with the souls that have been born again, 

 walk about in heaven just as they did in this vale of 

 tears ; they see God with their eyes, they hear his 

 voice with their ears, they sing hymns to his praise 

 with their larynx, and so forth. In fine, the modern 

 inhabitants of the Christian Paradise have the same 

 dual character of body and soul, the same organs of 

 an earthly body, as our ancient ancestors had in 

 Odin's Hall in Walhalla, as the "immortal" Turks 

 and Arabs have in Mohammed's lovely gardens, as 



