--The future world never a place
of rewards and punishments.--The house of the Sun the
heaven of the red man.--The terrestrial paradise and the
under-world.--Cupay.--Xibalba.--Mictlan.--Metempsychosis?--Belief
in a resurrection of the dead almost universal.
The missionary Charlevoix wrote several excellent works on America
toward the beginning of the last century, and he is often quoted by
later authors; but probably no one of his sayings has been thus honored
more frequently than this: "The belief the best established among our
Americans is that of the immortality of the soul."[233-1] The tremendous
stake that every one of us has on the truth of this dogma makes it quite
a satisfaction to be persuaded that no man is willing to live wholly
without it. Certainly exceptions are very rare, and most of those which
materialistic philosophers have taken such pains to collect, rest on
misunderstandings or superficial observation.
In the new world I know of only one well authenticated instance where
all notion of a future state appears to have been entirely wanting, and
this in quite a small clan, the Lower Pend d'Oreilles, of Oregon.
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