I see.  Does our theology furnish us with no clear conception of the state of the soul after death?  The Catholic Church teaches that the spirit at death descends into the interior of the earth to a place called Hades, where it is detained until the day of judgment, when it is reunited with the dust of the body, and ascends to a heaven in the sky.  This doctrine has the merit of being positive, clear, and comprehensible, and, consequently, whenever expressed, it always means something exact and well-defined.  Has the Protestant Church equally definite notions on the subject, or, in fact, any fixed opinions respecting it whatever?  If not, why, as a matter of good taste, for no weightier reason, in records almost imperishable like these, leave the matter alone!  Silence is better than nonsense.  Suppose a few thousand years hence our civilization to have become extinct, and that some antiquary from the antipodes should visit this desolate hill to excavate, like Layard at Nineveh, for relics of the old Americans.  Suppose, having collected a ship-load of broken tombstones, he should forward them to the Polynesian Museum, and set the savans of the age at work deciphering their inscriptions, what sense would be made out of these epitaphs?  How would they interpret our notions of a future state?  Taking our own monuments, cut with our own hands, inscribed with our own signs-manual, what would they infer our system of religion to have been?  If the Egyptians were as vague and careless as we in this matter, our archaeologists must have made some amusing blunders.

Here are two epitaphs which suggest something else:—­

  No.  I.

  “I loved him in his beauty,
  A mother boy while here,
  I knew he was an angel bright
  Formed for another sphere.”

  No.  II.

  “Farewell my wife and children dear
  God calls you home to rest. 
  Still Angels wisper in my ear
  We’ll meet in heavenly bliss.”

I want to make two annotations upon these.  In No. 1 you will notice that a possessive ’s is wanting, and in No. 2 that the h is omitted from whisper.  A marble-cutter told me once, that a Pennsylvania Dutchman came to him one day to have an inscription cut upon a gravestone for his daughter, whose name was Fanny.  The father, upon learning that the price of the inscription would be ten cents a letter, insisted that Fanny should be spelt with one n, as he should thereby save a dime!  The marble-cutter, unable to overcome the obstinacy of the frugal Teuton, and unwilling to set up such a monument of his ignorance of spelling, compromised the matter by conforming to the current orthography, and inserted the superfluous consonant for nothing.  And my second annotation shall consist of an inquiry:  What is there in corrupt and diseased human nature which makes persons prefer such execrable rhyme as that quoted above, and that which I find