And so, these are the rough-hewn songs of a man; of one who goes his way with his love upholding him and the Vision burning within him and the sound of battle forever in his ears and the whole-hearted hate of his enemy to spur him, and the stalwart comradeship of his fellows to make dear the thorny way. The Nietzschean Love of Eternity GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER After all, there have been great wars before this pan-European cataclysm; and, naturally enough, according to the psychological law of the expansion of the emotions, men have transferred their experiences of time to the content of eternity. Thus, amid the abomination of desolation which the Thirty Years' War brought upon the German Fatherland, one Johannes Rist, a clergyman residing in the neighborhood of Hamburg, sang his symptomatic song: "O Ewigkeit, du Donnerwort! Du Schwert, das durch die Seele bohrt! O Anfang sonder Ende! O Ewigkeit, Zeit ohne Zeit, Ich weiss vor lauter Traurigkeit, Nicht, wo ich mich hinwende!" The thunder and blood of war are in it. The horrors of the war long have passed, but not those of the song. Today you may hear the old hymn sung from new hymn-books in German churches. Today still, school children commit it to memory in their schools--with what profound and terrible impression, who can say? All the pains which little children feel so quiveringly with their defenseless and susceptible natures, all these will continue unbrokenly in eternity. On this bank and shoal of time, children easily and happily forget the tribulations of a bygone hour--in eternity, never, never again! But might there not be also an eternity of childish play and joy? Even so, that could not tip the scale in view of the possibility of a comfortless and cruel eternity; especially since the possibility becomes a probability, and the probability a certainty, owing to the fact that the children are taught to consider themselves as lost and damned sinners--in Adam's fall they sinned all! Consequently the remote hope of bliss in "Jerusalem the golden with milk and honey blest" could not assuage the grief nor silence the terror and torture that filled the child mind. "Would that there were no eternity!"--often this must have been the secret thought of German children, and not of these alone. This is the eternity of fear.