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merits, as set forth in the brahrainical code, were publicly taught 

 by Pythagoras, but also many of the other moral and religious 

 tenets of the Hindoos. Craufurd says many of the latter believe 

 that some souls are sent back to the spot where their bodies were 

 burnt, there to wait until the new bodies they are destined to oc- 

 cupy be ready for their reception. This appears to correspond 

 with an opinion of Plato; which, with many other tenets of that 

 philosopher, was adopted by the early christians. The institutes 

 of Menu, enlarging on this subject, assert that the vital souls of 

 those men who have committed sins in the body, shall certainly, 

 after death, assume another body, composed of nerves, with five 

 sensations, in order to be the more susceptible of torment; and 

 being intimately united with those minute nervous particles, ac- 

 cording to their distribution, they shall feel, in that new body, the 

 pangs indicted in each by the sentence of Yama. 



It was a prevailing idea with the Grecian and Roman philo- 

 sophers, and, as is often mentioned in these memoirs, it is equally 

 so among the enlightened brahmins, that the spirit of man origi- 

 nally emanates from the Great Soul of Being, the Divine 

 Spirit: and when, by the inevitable stroke of death, it quits its 

 tenement of clay, it is again absorbed into the immensity of the 

 Deity. This, they taught, was to be the final state of the virtuous, 

 while the souls of the wicked were doomed to punishments pro- 

 portionate to their crimes. Such were the purest doctrines of 

 Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; both these and their 

 moral system deserve our admiration, but how far short do they 

 fall from the faith of, the ancient patriarchs in the Great Jehovah, 

 long before the law was given to Moses, or grace and truth 



