only to my own spirit, and which never could have been known at all except through the movements of that spirit. I write upon the doors of the outward world an inscription which belongs to my inner nature, and seem to receive from without an impression which has really been imported from within.

It is in vain, therefore, to say that the Teuton derived his conception of Balder from beholding the phenomena of the heavens; it is true, but it is irrelevant. If he derived his conception from the heavens, it was because he had first given it to the heavens. The alternations of the outward light had been to him simply a mirror in which he had seen reflected the movements of his own soul. When he constructed the idea of Balder from looking on the struggles of the summer sun, he merely took back from that sun the thought which he himself had originally lent to it. The ultimate explanation of the myth must lie in the region of the mind. Balder himself is a personification, and so is the sun in the heavens; the one as much as the other requires to be explained on mental grounds. If so, the explanation ought to be very simple, and can be nothing else than what has here been indicated. Balder in the field of history, and the sun in the field of the heavens, are alike and equally the embodiment of a great thought-the thought that the life of man proceeds from peace to conflict, and from conflict back

to peace. But if it be so, it follows beyond all controversy that the message of the Teuton is the message of development. To him distinctively amongst the votaries of the religious world there has fallen the task of exhibiting the progressive nature of the divine life. The votaries of other faiths have been concerned with other elements. The Brahman has seen the God above the world, and the Greek has seen the God in the world; to the Teuton has been assigned the part of describing the divine life above. the world and the divine life in the world, as separate stages of one and the same existence, as steps of progressive development in the unfolding of the universal plan.,

And let it be remembered that to the playing of this part the Teuton has been true. The message of the primitive race has been the message of the race in its phase of highest culture. At the beginning of this century there appeared in Germany a form of thought which has revolutionised all previous philosophies, and exerted an influence even over unsympathetic schools; I allude, of course, to that system called Hegelianism. It is supposed to be a system defying the understanding of ordinary mortals. Yet, when looked at dispassionately, and divested of abstruse language, it will be found to be simply a refined reproduction by the Teuton mind in maturity of that which in primitive days it conceived in germ. Hegel says that in the uni

verse as a whole, and in every part of the universe, there are three successive movements. The first is one of unimpeded motion-of motion without opposition, and therefore without recognition. A man running at full speed on a seemingly boundless plain, and with no memory of having ever occupied any other attitude, would never say even to himself that he was free. The idea of freedom could only be reached by an interruption to the seeming boundlessness, could only be realised in the meeting with a barred gate. Accordingly the barred gate appears, and marks the second stage of the universal life. The unimpeded movement is interrupted, the unqualified affirmation is contradicted, and the day of spontaneous growth is succeeded by the day of conflict. It is an hour of apparent decline, but of real progress, the spirit of life has lost its first riches, but in the act of losing, it has learned for the first time what it is to be rich. Then comes the final stage, in which the contradiction itself is reconciled, and the spirit for the second time is actually, for the first time consciously, free. The barred gate is found to have, itself, an opening; it yields to the pressure of the arm, and the struggling soul is again unimpeded on its way. Yet the last stage is by no means a repetition of the first. It is freedom, but it is freedom won. It is no longer the mere rushing over a plain that is boundless; it is the emancipation from a gate that is barred. It is not

only the first state restored; it is the first state restored and revealed. Originally it was unrevealed; it was too near to the consciousness to be itself an object of knowledge; it was unopposed, and therefore it was unfelt. The barred gate has restrained it, and therefore manifested it, and in passing through the gate the life has for the first time passed into the consciousness of its own possession.

And what is this modern Hegelianism but a cultured reprint of the primitive Teutonic view? Is it not the same rhythm that is the object of search in the myths of the ancient Eddas? Here also wel see the three successive ages. We see the age of spontaneous power, in which Woden and Thor reign. supreme, the period when there is peace in heaven because there is as yet no admixture of the earth. We see the age when the spontaneous power is broken, and when, in the arena of deadly conflict, good and evil stand face to face. At last we behold the battle ended and the combatants swept away. The days of spontaneity again return, but they are no longer the spontaneity of ignorance. They are the days in which the power of action has become unconscious of itself through long-continued consciousness, in which virtue has become the native. atmosphere of the life by the persistent habit of living within it. The peace of the last stage is not the peace of paradise lost but of paradise regained.

It is no longer simply a state into which the soul is born; it is a state which the soul has chosen, and which by an act of will it has marked out for its own.

And if the Teuton mythology has thus its significance in the field of philosophic development, it is not without a voice also in the field of scientific thought. It has been the office of the Teuton to trace the development of the world not only from within but from without; he has had his Darwin as well as his Hegel. And in the sphere of Darwinism, as in the sphere of Hegelianism, the moral has been the same-peace through conflict, unity through contradiction. Darwinism has sought to trace the process by which the fittest have survived, and it has found that process to have been one of struggle. Here again the Teuton mind has been true to itself, true to its primitive myths and its primitive instincts. What is the mythology of the Eddas but a history of the survival of the fittest, and a delineation of how that survival has been effected through struggle? There is, indeed, in the centre of this mythology a thought which has a deep bearing upon the whole question of scientific survival. It emphasises beyond all other points the fact that the thing which in the long-run is most fitted to survive is, on that very account, the thing which in intermediate periods is least adapted to live. Balder is the personification of all goodness and of all beauty; he is the ideal of completed excellence, and therefore the