destroys all evil, and leaves the indestructible God alone in his
pure essence again. The artistic germ or seed force then begins,
under its laws of intrinsic necessity, to go once more through the
same process to the same end.

The rise of this imagery and belief is not so obvious as in the
last instance, but it is equally discoverable and intelligible.
Every animal, every flower, every plant, begins from its proper
specific germ or force, goes through a fixed series of growths and
changes, and relapses into its prime elements, and another and
another follow after it in the same order. The seasons come and
go, and come again and go again, Every planet repeats its
revolutions over and over. Wherever we look, this repetition of
identical processes greets our vision. Now, by imaginative
association universalize this repetition of the course of
phenomena as seen in the parts, and take it up and apply it to the
whole creation, and you have the doctrine in hand.

It is a poetic process of thought not scientific or philosophic,
and without claim to belief; yet, in the absence of scientific
data and standards, it might easily win acceptance on authority.

The Scandinavians, also, have transmitted to us, in their sacred
books, descriptions of their belief in the approaching end of the
world, descriptions rude, wild, terrible, not without elements of
appalling grandeur. They foretell a day called Ragnarok, or the
Twilight of the gods, when all the powers of good and evil shall
join in battle, and the whole present system of things perish in a
scene of unutterable strife and dismay. The Eddas were composed in
an ignorant but deeply poetic and fertile age, when all the
mythological elements of mind were in full action. Their authors
looking within, on their own passions, and without, on the natural
scenery around them, conscious of order and disorder, love and
hate, virtue and crime, beholding phenomena of beauty and horror,
sun and stars, night and tempest, winter and summer, icebergs and
volcanoes, placid moonlight and blinding mist, assisting friends
and battling foes, personified everything as a demon or a
divinity. Asgard, above the blue firmament, was the bright home of
the gods, the Asir. Helheim, beneath the rocky earth and the
frozen ocean, was the dark and foul abode of the bad spirits, the
Jotuns. Everywhere in nature, fog and fire, fertility and
barrenness, were in conflict; everywhere in society, law and crime
we