Ewigkeitsmensch!--the wind from the unexplored swells his sail, seafarer's gale roaring in from the boundless. When time and space vanish from sight, vanish coasts also, the last fetters drop away: the body feels its weight and burden is past! How shall we go about rescuing ourselves from this torture and casting off this oppression? In a strange fanatical vision, Nietzsche shows how he became an eternity-preacher, an eternity-sculptor. The vision is more novel than that of the Ascension which biblical legends narrate. The disciples of Jesus gaze upon their Master mounting heavenward into the clouds, and they hear strange words of the Christ coming down from heaven again to abide with them all the days till the end of the world. Nietzsche does not speak of the second advent of the Christ, of a recurrence of a single item of being, but of an eternal recurrence of all things, of all men, all moments and happenings of all life! Eternal return--to live life so that we would live each and all of it over again--to live it all so that it would be worth being not once but once again forever and forever--to be joint creator of a cosmos in which what is shall be fit--to be once yet again everlastingly--that is our, and Being's, final flawless test, passing which, no Great White Throne may fill us with dismay! There is the heart's harrowing cry: Could I but begin and live it--all over again, how different I would do! Would we like to do all that we have done over again? do them again eternally? Would we like to say and hear all the senseless prattle over again forever? Horrible thought! It were well to live and speak so that our existence can stand the fiery test of a Nietzschean eternity--live now in a way that it would be worth while to live again. It were indeed well to fill each fleeting moment of time with what is worthy to be the content of eternity. Eternity the criterion of time--that is really a great thought. To be sure, there is no eternal recurrence, and it is not clear that Nietzsche meant to say that there was. Faith in the eternal recurrence of all things, Nietzsche means this,--so at all events it seems to me,--to be a mirror in which we may recognize the true full worth of our life, a life in which there is nothing to be forgotten, nothing to be regretted, nothing done to be undone, because all is freed from the limitations of space and time and from external contingencies, and stands there in its great eternal necessity, because eternal, good, and godly even, in this necessity itself. Then we would not only live our life over again precisely as we lived it, we would live it in the light of the eternity again, ever again. No error, and folly would we then wish out of our life, because in this love of eternity it is precisely from error and folly that the truth grows which lights our faith. No weakness, no stumbling and falling, would we wish out of our life, because in the eternal illumination, power grows from all these