fall who, by a persistent choice of evil, ultimately lose all notion even of goodness. The terrestrial paradise is a charming symbol for the primitive innocence of the child: he has done as yet no evil, he has done as yet no good; his earliest disobedience is his first sin; when desire is awakened in him for the first time, his will has been conquered, he has fallen, but this fall is precisely the condition of his being set upon his feet again, of his redemption by the moral law; behold him condemned to labour, to the hard labour of man upon himself, to the struggle of self-mastery; without that contest to strengthen him he would never see the god descend in him, Christ the Saviour, the moral ideal. Thus it is in the evolution of the human conscience that a key to human symbolism must be found.[56] Of them must be said what the philosopher Sallust said of religious legends generally in his treatise “On the Gods and the World”: Such things have never happened, but they are eternally true. Religion is the morality of the people; it shows to them, realized and divinized, the higher types of conduct which they should force themselves to imitate here below; the dreams with which it peoples the skies are dreams of justice, of equality of goods, of fraternity: Heaven pays for earth. Let us then no longer employ the names of God, of Christ, of the Resurrection except as symbols, vague as hope itself. Then, according to Mr. Matthew Arnold, and those who maintain the same thesis, we shall begin to love these symbols, our faith will find a resting place in the religion which before seemed to be but a tissue of gross absurdities. Beneath dogma, which is but the surface, we shall find the moral law, which is the substance. This law, it is true, has in religion become concrete; it has, so to speak, taken on colour and form. That, however, is simply owing to the fact that people are poets; they think in images or not at all. You can only attract their attention by pointing your finger at something. After all, what harm is there in the fact that the apostles, opening the blue ether, showed the gaping nations of the earth the thrones of gold and seraphim and white wings, and the kneeling multitude of the elect? This spectacle fascinated the Middle Age, and at times, when we shut our eyes, we seem to see it still. This poetry, spread upon the surface of the moral law, lends it an attractiveness that it did not possess in its bare austerity. Sacrifice becomes less difficult when it presents itself crowned with a halo. The early Christians were not fond of representing Christ as bleeding under the crown of thorns, but as transfigured and triumphant; they preferred to keep his agony in the background. Such pictures as ornament our Churches would have filled them with horror; their young faith would have been shaken by the image of the “agony upon the cross,” which caused Goethe also a sort of a repugnance. When they represented the cross it was