its periodical destructions." It is
taught with distinctness by all religious systems, by the prophetess in
the Voluspa, by the Hebrew seers,[171-1] by the writer of the
Apocalypse, by the Eastern sages, Persian and Indian, by the Roman
Sibyl, and among the savage and semi-civilized races of the New World.

Often that looked for destruction was associated with the divine plans
for man. This was an addition to the simplicity of the original myth,
but an easy and a popular one. The Indian of our prairies still looks
forward to the time when the rivers shall rise, and submerging the land
sweep from its surface the pale-faced intruders, and restore it to its
original owners. Impatient under the ceaseless disappointments of life,
and worn out with the pains which seem inseparable from this condition
of things, the believer gives up his hopes for this world, and losing
his faith in the final conquest of the good, thinks it only attainable
by the total annihilation of the present conditions. He looks for it,
therefore, in the next great age, in the new heaven and the new earth,
when the spirit of evil shall be bound and shut up, and the chosen
people possess the land, "and grow up as calves of the stall."[172-1]

This is to be inaugurated by the Day of Judgment, "the day of wrath, the
dreadful day," in which God is to come in his power and pronounce his
final decrees on those who have neglected the observance due him. The
myth, originally one relating to the procession of natural forces, thus
assumed with the increasing depth of the religious sentiment more and
more a moral and subjective coloring, until finally its old and simple
form was altogether discarded, or treated as symbolic only.

The myth of the Epochs of Nature was at first a theory to account for
the existing order of nature. For a long time it satisfied the inquiring
mind, if not with a solution at least with an answer to its queries.
After geologic science had learned to decipher the facts of the world's
growth as written on the stones which orb it, the religious mind fondly
identified the upheavals and cataclysms there recorded with those which
its own fancy had long since fabricated. The stars and suns, which the
old seer thought would fall from heaven in the day of wrath, were seen
to be involved in motions far beyond the pale of man's welfare, and,
therefore, the millennial change was confined to the limits of our
planet. Losing more and more of its origina