The St. Johns herald., 1890-07-31
IDEAS ABOUT HEAVEN.
Aspirations and Faiths Concerning the
 Great Beyond.


 Every body has heard of the poor old fellow, aged, bent double by labor and sickness, and with only Q secondhand acquaintance with pleasure, who when asked his idea of heaven answered that it seemed to him place where one might sit forever in an easy chair and be served with cake and wine by angels. Such @ heaven seemed to his imagina- tion-nurtured all his life cn aches and pains and thoughts of the lab0rs Of the morrow-a workable elvsiuIn; the an tithesis of his somber experiences of life, and in consequence there was notn- ing irrelevant in his answer, but simply a description Of what to him was thought full of joy and comfort to his aching bones. Simple, however, as was the old mans answer, it was repre- sentative of the universal voice Of man kind. and contained within it the germ of that faith which in all it's ages has blossomed out into aspirations of the bliss and joy of the great ''unknown," whose problem has never yet been solved.
 The early Christians, torn by wild beasts in the Roman arena, driven to secret worship in underground holes, persecuted, tormented and despised, pictured a gorgeous city with streets or gold and gates of pearl, through which they could pass with erect head and crowned with gold, bearing palms in their hands and decked in new robes, singing till their hymn should resound as the voice of many waters. This, ac- cording to writer in the Brooklyn Standardization, was the Patmosian heaven, a scene of splendid felicity and pure Justification. What more entranc- inc idea could there be of such reward for those who are faithful unto death, and what more bright and sweet to the poor, quivering martyrs who, while writhing in flames and torture, could look smilinglyup to the troop of bright ones'' who come to bear them away to such delights.
 The Hebrew apocryphal literature de- scribes an upper, or heavenly, and lower, or earthly, paradise. Each Is divided into seven dwellings, each Of which is twelve times ten thousand miles Tn length and breadth. A column ascends from the lower to the upper heaven, by which the souls of the blessed mount to the higher after temporary soiourn in the lower. The Talmud names as one of the glOries of the upper paradise the society of Enoch, ! Elijah, Moses and Ezra, who walk in the light of the coming Messiah. At the last day all Israefs enemies are to be cast into Gehenna and the blessed gathered together in the higher para disc.
 The Mohammedan heaven, as de- scribed in the Koran, is place of the rarest delights, where the righteous re- l cline on messy couches in Q fair garden, l listening to entrancing strains and drinking of the rarest and pleasanteS' l beverages.
 The heaven of the old Norsemen is ! the abode of the heroes slain in battle, who live again in the scenes of their life, but amid eternal victories, chanting sagas and battle songs and quafiing mead from the skulls of their enemies.
 Of an entirely different nature is the heaven of the Buddhist. It consists of twenty-eight grades in gradually as cending scale of happiness as follows: The not-fghting, the joyful, the change enjoying, the changing others-ar- bitrarily, the assembled Brahmas, the servants of Brahma, the great Brahmas, limited light, illimited lights, pure light, limited pUcity, illimited purity, perfect purity, great merit, unconscious, the not great, the exempt from NRin, the well-seeing, the beautiful, She highest, illimited space, illimited science, the place of naught, that of mo- thought and that of not-no-thOught, this last being sphere where all the activities of life are nil. Indeed, the final goal of Buddhism looks toward the I destruction of sin by eXhausting it's eX- istence, or by impeding it's existence. Much akin to this are the Brahminical and Shinto heavens, as well as that ot the Parsees, which look toward final glorification in a state of ecstatic peace in company with Ahura-M Mazda, their supreme deity.
 There is something pathetically sim pie in the distinctively opposite idea in which the red mans heaven is con- ceived. To him there is spread out the happy hunting grounds where, with his dog. his bow and arrows, he may follow the deer over rustling prairies and through the whispering woods with nc paleface to follow to impose upon him the restraint he despises; all of which has been so happily described by Pope To. the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
 Sees God in clouds, or bears him Tn the wind. His soId proud science never taught to stray Far as the solar walk or milky way;
 Yet simple nature to his hope has given
 Behind the cloudtopd hill an humbleEheaven Some safer world in depths of woods embraced Some happier island in the watery waste,
 Where slaves once more their native land be
 hold,
 No thieves torment, no Christians thirst fo
 gold.
 To be, cOntertS lis natural desire;
 He asks no angels wing, no seraph's fire
 But thinks admitted to that equal sky,
 His faithful dog shall bear him company.
 \ Remedy for Chapped Hands.
 One of the best remedies for rough O