=Fury-worship as a Penal Hallucination.=--The teacher said: "Swedenborg describes, in his fashion, how the greatest tyrant arrived in Hades. He wished to stir up hell against heaven, and he was punished by having a terrible woman sent to rule him, whom he worshipped. She was a compendium of original sin, deliberate falsehood, wilful deceit, ugliness, uncleanness, destructiveness. But he was compelled to see in her the good, the beautiful, the lovable; he called her 'my angel.' All his adherents were obliged to worship her, or he called them 'woman-haters.' Whence Swedenborg derived his narratives, I know not, but his descriptions are like photographs of our everyday life. The modern worship of women does not come down from the Christian ages of chivalry, for those romanticists honoured womanhood in its virtues. Our new gyneolatry is derived from the heathen; it is a kind of fury-worship imposed on us as a penal hallucination. The sons of the Lord of Dung deify their furies, and praise their faults. In their view sin is virtue, wickedness is character, deceitfulness is a proof of intelligence, coarseness is strength. He who will not join in this devil-worship is called a woman-hater. Chaste wives and mothers are called old-fashioned and perverse. Euripides describes in the _Hippolytus_ how this king's son dedicated his devotion to the chaste Diana and fled the demotic Venus. This impure goddess avenged herself by accusing the innocent Hippolytus of incest and then caused him to be put to death. Euripides on account of writing this tragedy was called a 'woman-hater,' and is said to have been tom in pieces by female dogs. That is a pretty legend!" =Amerigo or Columbus.=--The teacher said: "Human greatness and the way of becoming great is something very remarkable. Often envious hatred of the deserving seems to be converted into immense love for the undeserving. The infatuation of hatred may go so far that when the deserving has done a good work, the undeserving gets the glory of it. But often also there are secret reasons for this abnormal result. Every schoolboy has asked why America was not named after Columbus, who discovered it. I also made that inquiry, and while I served the Lord of Dung I found it quite natural that the undeserving cartographer Vespucci should have the honour of the discovery. "But when I recovered my reason (and men called me mad), I read the biography of Columbus again. There I found that, together with his merits, he had great faults. Like David, he sinned by pride, avarice, cruelty, and deceit. His pride was boundless. Before undertaking his doubtful voyage, he laid down as a condition that he was to be Viceroy (he, the weaver's son!) and receive a tithe of the revenues. Well, he never learnt that he had discovered a new quarter of the globe. He died and was forgotten.