myth would certainly follow that he devoured
his own children, as Time is the devourer of the Dawns.[559:3] Saturn,
who devours his own children, is the same power whom the Greeks called
Kronos (Time), which may truly be said to destroy whatever it has
brought into existence.

The idea of a _Heaven_, the "Elysian fields," is also born of the sky.

The "_Elysian plain_" is far away in the _West_, where the sun goes
down beyond the bonds of the earth, when Eos gladdens the close of day
as she sheds her violet tints over the sky. The "Abodes of the Blessed"
are golden islands sailing in a sea of blue,--_the burnished clouds
floating in the pure ether_. Grief and sorrow cannot approach them;
plague and sickness cannot touch them. The blissful company gathered
together in that far _Western land_ inherits a tearless eternity.

Of the other details in the picture the greater number would be
suggested directly by these images drawn from the phenomena of sunset
and twilight. What spot or stain can be seen on the deep blue ocean in
which the "Islands of the Blessed" repose forever? What unseemly forms
can mar the beauty of that golden home, lighted by the radiance of a
_Sun_ which can never set? Who then but the pure in heart, the truthful
and the generous, can be suffered to tread the violet fields? And how
shall they be tested save by judges who can weigh the thoughts and the
interests of the heart? Thus every soul, as it drew near that joyous
land, was brought before the august tribunal of Minos, Rhadamanthys, and
Aiakos; and they whose faith was in truth a quickening power, might draw
from the ordeals those golden lessons which Plato has put into the mouth
of Socrates, and some unknown persons into the mouths of Buddha and
Jesus. The belief of earlier ages pictured to itself the meetings in
that blissful land, the forgiveness of old wrongs, and the
reconciliation of deadly feuds,[560:1] just as the belief of the present
day pictures these things to itself.

The story of a _War in Heaven_, which was known to all nations of
antiquity, is allegorical, and refers to the battle between light and
darkness, sunshine and storm cloud.[560:2]

As examples of the prevalence of the legend relating to the struggle
between the co-ordinate powers of good and evil, light and darkness, the
Sun and the clouds, we have that of Phoibos and Python, Indra and
Vritra, Sigurd and Fafuir, Achilleus and Paris, Oidipous and the Sphinx,
Ormuzd and