"_A rescued spirit to the goal_ _We bring of Earth's probation;_ /The ever-active striving soul/ /Works out its own salvation/. _And when, in love and mercy strong,_ _His God and Saviour meets him,_ _The angel-choir, to join their throng,_ _With hearty welcome greets him_." Among the throng of redeemed Penitents one appears conspicuous, whose name, while she lived on earth, was Margaret; she is close by the Virgin, interceding for Faust, and ever as she mounts with the Queen of Heaven to higher stages of glory, draws the newcomer after her to share in her sempiternal blessedness. The curtain then falls; the redeemed throngs ascend; and the scene resounds with the mystical chorus:-- _"Earth and earthly things_ _Type the celestial,_ _Shadow and shorn_ _Is all glory terrestrial;_ _Beauty immortal_ _The rapt spirit hails,_ _Where the eternally-_ _Female prevails."_ After so detailed an account of this rich and various exhibition of imaginative power, the student of this great world-drama, to use a German phrase, can have no difficulty in understanding the theology and the theodicy of the great Teutonic poet. The promise of the Prologue in Heaven is fulfilled; there is no such thing as everlasting punishment; and the Evil Spirit is sure to be cheated even of the souls for whom he has most surely bargained, if that soul, after staining itself with any number of sins, only perseveres at last in some course of honourable and useful activity. This is not according to the common Protestant conception in such cases; for Protestantism, having abolished Purgatory, lies under a necessity of peopling Tartarus more largely; and besides, after such a solemn compact with the Evil One, and twenty-four years (for that is the number given in the legend) spent in unrepented indulgence of all sensualities and vanities, it was dramatically as well as theologically inconsistent to redeem such a deliberate and persistent sinner from the damnation for which he had bargained. But the hell of the mediæval Catholic Church, though terrible enough in its pictorial presentation (as many an Italian cloister testifies) was more accommodating in its adaptation to the many forms of human weakness; and so, to magnify the grace of God, and make Christ all in all, after a fashion which the severe Protestant Calvinist is forced to condemn, the mediæval form of the Faust legend could afford to save Faust, notwithstanding his blood-sealed transaction with the Devil; and no one has a right to blame Goethe, morally and theologically, for having adopted this view of the matter. But, though the salvation of Faust, according to the feeling of orthodox mediæval Christianity, is permissible, and even desirable, the manner in which, and the process by which, his salvation is achieved by the German Protestant poet differs very much from the treatment it receives at the hand of the Catholic Church. In Christian