outside
the snake a broader ring of ice-mountains swept round both land and
ocean, and formed the outer frame of the world,--for there lay only
blank space beyond; and over all, the sun and moon performed their
journeys, chased through the sky by ravenous wolves, that ever sought to
devour them. Such was the wild dream of our Scandinavian ancestors,--a
dream, however, that occupied as prominent a place in their Edda as any
of their other religious beliefs, and which, with the first dawn of
science, would not only have fallen itself, but would have also dragged
down the others along with it.

Now this physical department has ever proved the vulnerable portion of
false religions,--the portion which, if I may use the metaphor, their
originators could not dip in the infernal river. The ability of drawing
the line, in the early and ignorant ages of the world, between what man
can of himself discover and what he cannot, is an ability which man
cannot possibly possess. The ancient Chaldeans, who first watched the
motions of the planets, could not possibly have foreseen, that while on
the one hand men would be one day able of themselves to measure and
weigh these bodies, and to determine their distances from the earth and
from each other, men might never be able of themselves to demonstrate
the fact of their authorship, or to discover the true character of their
author. Nay, if they could have at all thought on the subject, the
latter would have seemed to them by much the simpler discovery of the
two. To know at such a time what was in reality discoverable and what
was not, would be to know by anticipation what is not yet known,--the
limits of all human knowledge. It would be to trace a line non-existent
at the period, and untraceable, in the nature of things, until the
history of the human race shall be completed. It was held by even the
sagacious Socrates, that men cannot arrive at any certainty in questions
respecting the form or motion of the earth, or the mechanism of the
heavens; and so he set himself to elucidate what he deemed much simpler
matters,--to prove, for instance, as we find in the Phedon, that human
souls existed ere they came to inhabit their mortal bodies, and retained
faint recollections of great misfortunes that had overtaken them ere
their embodiment as men, and of sufferings to which they had been
subjected in a primevous state. And lacking this ability of
distinguishing between the naturally discoverab