are also obliged to shew their inferiority in religious observances; for it is required of them, that they should partly uncover themselves as they pass the morais, or take a considerable circuit to avoid them.  Though they have no notion that their god must always be conferring benefits, without sometimes forgetting them, or suffering evil to befall them, they seem to regard this less than the attempts of some more inauspicious being to hurt them.  They tell us, that Etee is an evil spirit, who sometimes does them mischief; and to whom, as well as to their god, they make offerings.  But the mischiefs they apprehend from any superior invisible beings, are confined to things merely temporal.

They believe the soul to be both immaterial and immortal.  They say that it keeps fluttering about the lips during the pangs of death; and that then it ascends and mixes with, or, as they express it, is eaten by the deity.  In this state it remains for some time; after which it departs to a certain place, destined for the reception of the souls of men where it exists in eternal night; or, as they sometimes say, in twilight or dawn.  They have no idea of any permanent punishment after death, for crimes that they have committed on earth; for the souls of good and of bad men are eat indiscriminately by God.  But they certainly consider this coalition with the deity as a kind of purification necessary to be undergone before they enter a state of bliss.  For, according to their doctrine, if a man refrain from all connexion with women some months before death, he passes immediately into his eternal mansion, without such a previous union; as if already, by this abstinence, he were pure enough to be exempted from the general lot.

They are, however, far from entertaining those sublime conceptions of happiness, which our religion, and indeed reason, gives us room to expect hereafter.  The only great privilege they seem to think they shall acquire by death is immortality; for they speak of spirits being, in some measure, not totally divested of those passions which actuated them when combined with material vehicles.  Thus, if souls, who were formerly enemies, should meet, they have many conflicts; though, it should seem, to no purpose, as they are accounted invulnerable in this invisible state.  There is a similar reasoning with regard to the meeting of man and wife.  If the husband dies first, the soul of the wife is known to him on its arrival in the land of spirits.  They resume their former acquaintance, in a spacious house, called tourooa, where the souls of the deceased assemble to recreate themselves with the gods.  She then retires with him, to his separate habitation, where they remain for ever, and have an offspring; which, however, is entirely spiritual, as they are neither married, nor are their embraces supposed to be the same as with corporeal beings.