As innumerable people have testified, these representations were taken so literally, not only by the simple-minded masses but also by the more highly educated, that they were haunted by them, waking and sleeping, and imagined that in their own flesh they felt the torture of flames, of boiling pitch, of the prick of the pitchfork as the devil turned them on the grid, of the teeth with which the spirits of hell tore their flesh from their bones. The fear of hell poisoned many a life up till quite recently, especially in Scotland, and kept people in a constant state of agitation and anguish which occasionally rose to mad despair. It is remarkable that only punishment was so impressively held up to man's view, but not reward. Pictures of paradise are much less rich and varied than those of hell, and its joys are peculiarly modest. The inventive powers of painters, sculptors, and poets did not rise above a beautifully illuminated hall where the blessed are ranged around God's throne and with folded hands sing hymns of praise to Him, while angels play an accompaniment on trumpets and fiddles. A prayer meeting, a choir and a concert of music, that is all that Christian eschatology holds out as an eternal reward to virtue. It redounds to its credit that it assumes a sufficiently modest taste among the good to make them long for these joys and find infinite happiness in them.
Islam does not count on such moderation. The joys of paradise that it promises are so crudely sensual that they may well arouse lust in coarse natures, and can counterbalance the fear of hell fire. The ideas of the reward of merit in the hereafter held by the northern nations, Germans and Scandinavians, are just as low and coarse. For the Mohamedans paradise is a harem; for the worshippers of Odin it is a pot-house where there are free drinks and a jolly brawl to end up with. Heroes who fall in battle--they knew no virtues but a warlike spirit and contempt of death--enter Valhalla, where they partake of the everlasting orgies of the gods, drink unlimited quantities of mead and beer, and fight for them to their heart's content without taking any harm. The North American Indians hope, after leading a model life, to be gathered to the Great Spirit, and in the happy hunting grounds of heaven evermore to kill abundant game. Only Buddhism comforts the virtuous man with finer and more spiritual hopes. From out his world of weariness and pessimism it opens up the prospect of Nirvana to him, that is, of the end of all feeling, which after all can only be painful, and of all thought, which after all is only melancholy and despair, and of the volatilization of the personality, the only real release; while it condemns the sinner to the worst punishment, continued existence in ever new incarnations.