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SCENES IN INDIA. 
is as incompatible with their ideas of the re-absorption 
of the soul into the divine essence, as with their 
literal belief of predestination. But they do not ad- 
mit the truth of this assertion, and some of their most 
celebrated teachers, who have revolted at a literal 
interpretation of the Koran, have maintained that 
sinners will be punished, and that the good will enjoy 
a higher and purer bliss than can be found in a sen- 
sual paradise. While others, more visionary, believe 
that the imagination will have as great a power in 
the other world as in this, and that the punishment 
of hell will consist in a delusion. Men, they say, 
will see a fire which they will conceive is to burn 
them, but which when it reaches them will prove 
cold. One writer of this sect goes so far as to assert 
that those who are condemned to hell, will soon, 
from the habit of living there, not only be reconciled 
to its heat, but deem it a blessing, and look with 
disgust on the joys of Paradise.” 
Such are the shallow fallacies by which men of 
heated imaginations attempt to delude mankind, and 
by which they really do impose upon the feeble 
minds of those who grasp at any shadow projected 
from the cloudy hemisphere of what they miscall reli- 
gion, to prop their hopes of impunity for sin. What is 
there, however monstrous, that human credulity will 
not accept for truth when given under the sanction of 
some pretender to infallibility ? Throughout the East 
gorgeous monuments have been raised to perpetuate 
the impositions of such pretenders, whose bold vaticina- 
tions and monstrous heresies have obtained for them 
canonization among sectaries of the same persuasion. 
