We have already arrived at the edge of one of those precipices of which I spoke--Faust must be saved. But what did Goethe mean, or, to ask a fairer question, what do we ourselves mean, by being _saved_? No formula of words seems able to provide us with a satisfactory answer. We can indeed use metaphors drawn from the universe of Time and Space--we can speak of 'another world' and of a 'future life'--but as soon as we attempt to conceive such existence _sub specie aeternitatis_ our imagination fails: to use the metaphor of Socrates, we are dazzled by the insupportable radiance of the eternal and infinite, and seek to rest our eyes by turning them toward shadows, reflexions, images: we accept the beautiful image--the enigma (as St. Paul calls it) or allegory--of a heaven in some far interspace of world and world. As a poet, and especially as a dramatic poet, Goethe, if he treated the subject at all, was compelled to accept some imaginative conception of a future life, and he could scarcely accept any other but that which was in keeping with the old legend--that heaven of angels and saints and penitents which was the converse of the legendary hell and its fiends. Whether however he was justified by the principles of true dramatic art in his attempt to depict his imaginative conception and to place on the stage a representation of heaven may be doubted. Certainly the effect of Goethe's picture, especially when seen on the stage, is such that one cannot but wish some other solution might have been devised, and one feels as if one understood better than before why it was that Shakespeare's dramatic instinct allowed no such lifting of the veil. You remember the last words of the dying Hamlet: 'The rest is silence.' Thus far therefore we have come: by Faust being saved it is meant that he escapes from the fiend and reaches heaven, reaches the 'higher spheres' of existence, as Goethe expresses it. But the mere fact of his being saved does not form the essential difference between this drama and earlier versions of the story. The point of real importance is that he is not saved in a downward course by the intervention of some _deus ex machina_, some orthodox counter-charm. His course is not downward. His yearnings are not for bodily ease and sensual enjoyment but for truth--truth, not to be attained by speculation or scientific research but by action and feeling--by struggling onward through error and sin, and by gaining purification and strength from trial and suffering and resistance to evil; so that evil itself is a means to his salvation and Mephistopheles an instrument of good. Rising on the stepping-stones of his dead self he finds at last a certain measure of peace and is in the end reunited to her whose earthly happiness he had indeed ruined but whose love his heart has never forgotten. Indeed it is her love that is allowed to guide him ever aright and to draw him up to higher spheres.