ments of Tartarus upon rebellious gods and incorrigible men :

These are the realms of unrelenting fate,
And awful Rhadamanthus rules the state.
He hears and judges each committed crime;
Inquires into the manner, place and time:
The conscious wretch must all his acts reveal;
Loth to confess, unable to conceal;
From the first moment of his vital breath,
To his last hour of unrepenting death.

Had I a hundred mouths, a hundred tongues,
And throats of brass, inspired with iron lungs,
I could not half those horrid crimes repeat,

Nor half the punishments those crimes have met.'

From the judge and inflicter of punishment for sins, in a Tartarus of fire, to the medieval or Moslem devil, who receives the wicked soul into hell fire, with the appliances of whips of flame, red hot pincers, vipers, vultures, poison and filth, there is but a step, and we can understand how this latter development followed that which had been building up for untold ages.

upon

True to their original conceptions, the Jews did not create a monarch of their Gehenna, nor did the early Christians really do so: the Epistles of Peter and Jude and the Apocalypse show that Gehenna, the

bottomless pit, and the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, were prepared for the Devil and his angels; and that Satan, the Devil, that old serpent, classed with all the irretrievable wicked of the earth, were to be cast into it, not as a hierarchy with varying positions and powers, but in one common destruction. Asmodeus was the Rabbinic prince of the demons ; Beelzebub was the gospel prince of the devils; and Satan, the accusing angel of the old system, was gradually growing into power, but there was no god of Hades, or of Tartaros, such as the Greeks and Romans described. The nearest approach to the expression is in the Apocalypse, where Abaddon, or Apollyon, as the personification of destruction, issuing from the bottomless pit in the form of locusts, is described as their king and the angel of the bottomless pit.

In other religions there were also judges of the dead, such as Yama, the Hindu god of hell and justice, one of many types of a first ancestor, ruling the souls of his descendants in the land of shades; and who is probably identical with Yami, the Vedic spirit of darkness, Yima, the Iranian king of paradise, O Yama, the Japanese chief of the demons, and Amma, the Sintoo god of hell. Many religions recognize death, destruction, and other abstract ideas as personified in a monarch of Hell; such as the Hindu Kali, destruction, the Gothic Kalja, the black one,

and Hel or Hela, the Scandinavian goddess of death. But all these personified abstractions came too late into the Christian system to influence the evolution of the Christian ideal of the monarch of hell, the modern Satan.

With man's first belief in a future state, came his first idea of Hades,-invisible and eternal,-the abode of all the dead, both good and bad. The invisible gods fought amongst themselves, the conquerors monopolized the realms of bliss, and put the conquered under durance vile. The disembodied souls of men lived on, but practically unconscious and unnoticed, re-embodiment alone revived them. A few distinguished by great deeds or great impiety, rose to the rank of demigods, and were favoured with a god-like life of bliss or woe. As by degrees, men convinced themselves that they were equal to the gods, they claimed their privilege of conscious life, and a share of heaven and hell. Hades then required judges, executioners and varied regions of bliss and woe. The judges grew in grimness, the executioners in terror, until fear invested many of the judges and all the executioners with such hateful attributes, that their merger into the personality of the Devil,-man's adversary and accuser,-was the result. Hatred led to revenge, and this concentrated judge and executioner has been himself at last linked with his prisoners, and condemned to everlasting punishment.

M

VII.

FIRE.

Man without Fire-The Fire-drill-Pramantha-The Forbidden Fruit-Prometheus-Fire-worship-Sacred Fire-Fire-godsAgni-Izdhubar-Spirits of Fire-Red Spirits-The Sun-Lightning-Metal-working-Magic Wands and Iron-Metal-working Gods Consuming Fire-Cremation - Devouring DeitiesMoloch-Gehenna-Impure Fire-Hebrew History-Persian Fire-spirits Asmodeus-Solomon and the Temple-Iblis The Devil-on-two-sticks-Mephistopheles.

THE element of fire has in all ages appealed to the deepest feelings of mankind. This is not surprising : the most prosaic utilitarian is bound to admit its value in daily life: the least poetical observer of Nature can hardly stand unmoved in the presence of the sun in all the golden glory of his setting: and the lightning flash, the rocking earthquake, and the volcanic outburst, must arrest the attention of the most indifferent. The brute creation is equally impressed by these developments of fire: animals court and enjoy its mild warmth: the rising sun awakens the woods to melodious joy, and makes them teem with life the storm and earthquake paralyze all Nature into deadly silence with overwhelming dread : the lava stream and prairie fire make hungry beasts

of prey forget their savage instincts, in the panicstricken struggle to escape: and even the encampment fire suffices to keep off the prowling wolf by a kind of fascination.

It is difficult to realize what the world was without fire; or rather, without the utilization of fire; for man must always have had some experience of fire as a physical fact; the lightning, the burning mountain, the sparks from the flints which the riverdrift man chipped for his weapons and tools, must have made the phenomena of fire familiar; but until man had learnt how to use and perpetuate fire and artificial light, what a strange existence must his have been! No cooked food, no metals, no bricks; nothing to scare away the midnight foe, to counteract miasmatic damps, or biting frosts: nothing to relieve the long dark nights of winter. Who could be surprised at man, under such circumstances, looking up to heaven, and saluting the sun as his best friend ; and regarding the rest of the heavenly host as the sun's attendants; or at his mourning and desponding as the days grew shorter and shorter; and rejoicing at the birth of the new year, when the crisis of winter was passed and the dark dread nights became less and less wearisome and chill?

We can well imagine that before the days of fire and artificial light, men "lived as infants, . who, seeing, saw in vain, hearing they heard not.