194
THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY.
The early Christians for a long time expected the “ pan
destruction ” and the coming of the Kingdom. But as the
suffer, the wicked triumph, the world is full of strife : whence does this
arise if God is good and just? The question is profoundly treated in the
splendid poem of Job, as M. Renan has so well pointed out. The nev^-
ending controversy between optimism and pessimism was taken up by
Voltaire and Rousseau, with reference to the famous poem on the earth
quake at Lisbon. The belief that the world, fundamentally bad, must
perish in flames, in order to make way for a new heaven and a new earth,
is found in all the old religions. In Mazdeism the successive cycles of the
development of humanity on earth end in a general conflagration, followed
by a universal renewal. In the Wolospa of the Eddas the palingenesis is
conceived almost exactly as in our Gospels:—
{Signs of the Doom.)
‘ ‘ The sun shall grow black.
The earth shall sink into the sea.
The bright stars shall vanish from the heavens.
Smoke and fire shall gush forth.
The terrible flame shall play against the very sky.”
( The Sibyl of the world to come.)
“ I can see earth rise a second time, fresh and green out of the sea.
The waters are falling, the erne hovering over them.
The bird that hunts the fish in the mountain streams.
The fields unsown shall yield their fruit ;
All ills shall be healed at the coming of Balder.
The Anses shall meet on the Field of Ith,
And do judgments under the mighty Tree of the world.
[I have taken this translation of the Sibyl’s prophecy from the reconstructed
version of the Wolospa in the admirable work of Messrs. Vigfusson and
Powell {Corpus Poeticum Boreale, vol. ii. 625). These learned editors
think that the lines, “Then there shall come One yet mightier. Though 1
dare not name him,” evidently alluding to the coming of Christ, belong to
a separate poem, the shorter Wolospa, which they have also pieced togeth^.
— TV.] In the splendid lines of Virgil’s fourth Eclogue are to be found the
echo of the aspirations after a new world met with in all antiquity and
especially in the Sibylline songs :—
“ Magnus ab integro sæclorum nascitur ordo.
Jam nova progenies cselo demittitur alto.
. . . ae toto surget gens aurea mundo.
. . . omnis feret omnia tellus.”
Virgil depicts the regeneration of Nature ; the Edda and the Gospel dwell
rather on social regeneration and the triumph of Justice. Courier has also
his palingenesis with its anti-lions, its anti-whales, and its ocean of lemon
ade • but we may prefer the Wolospa and the Gospel. Pierre Leroux, >0
his book IJHumanité, ii. 6, has well pointed out how the ideas of paljd-
genesis, common to all antiquity, are connected with astrology and with
certain theories about cosmical periods.
