Ragnarok : the age of fire and gravel
THE BRIDGE. 385
of the Drift have left their stamp even in our schoolbooks. And the memory of this Bridge survives not only in our geographies, but in our religions.
Man reasons, at first, from below upward ; from godlike men up to man-like gods; from Cwsar, the soldier, up to Cesar, the deity. :
Heaven was, in the beginning, a heayenly city on earth ; it is transported to the clouds ; and there its golden streets and sparkling palaces await the redeemed.
This is natural: we can only conceive of the best of the spiritual by the best we know of the material ; we can imagine no musical instrument in the hands of the angels superior to a harp ; no weapon better than a sword for the grasp of Gabriel.
This disproves not a spiritual and superior state ; it simply shows the poverty and paucity of our poor intellectual apparatus, which, like a mirror, reflects only that which is around it, and reflects it imperfectly. ~
Men sometimes think they are mocking spiritual things when it is the imperfection of material nature, (which they set so much store by,) that provokes their ridicule. So, among all the races which went out from this heayenly land, this land of high intelligence, this land of the master race, it was remembered down through the ages, and dwelt upon and sung of until it moved upward from the waters of the Atlantic to the distant skies, and became a spiritual heaven. And the ridges which so strangely connected it with the continents, east and west, became the bridges oyer which the souls of men must pass to go from earth to heaven.
For instance :
The Persians believe in this bridge between earth and
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