ue to St.
John's Gospel both represented and fostered ideas which were
current in the earliest Christian communities and have coloured
the whole of the primitive Christian literature.

So in the most ancient of the classical mythologies, Night was
one of the oldest deities, daughter of Chaos, and sister of
Erebus, the dark underworld. So in Persian dogmatic we have
the same essential concepts. From the beginning existed
uncreated light and uncreated darkness--the opposing kingdoms
of Ahura and Ahriman.

Who shall say what great cosmic facts lie behind these vague
and looming intuitions? The physical merges by insensible
degrees into the aesthetic, the moral, the spiritual. On the one
hand, the chill, the blankness, the negation, sometimes the
horror, of the darkness. And on the other hand the purity and
beauty, the colour and effulgence of the light--above all, its
joy-giving, life-giving, though noiseless, energy.

Coming down to the present, we ask if these mystic influences
of light and of darkness still retain their power. Can we doubt
it? We have Milton's Melancholy, "of Cerberus and blackest
Midnight born"--"where brooding darkness spreads his jealous
wings." All this no mere refurbishing of classical lore, but the
outcome of deep sympathy with the poets of the prime. And the
same is true of his buoyant lines that describe the breaking of
the day, when morn

"Waked by the circling hours, with rosy hand
Unbarr'd the gates of light."

In sympathy, too, with the old belief in Ahura's final victory is
Emerson's declaration that "the night is for the day, but the day
is not for the night."

Browning finely discriminates the grades of darkness in
Sordello, where he addresses Dante as

"pacer of the shore
Where glutted hell disgorgeth filthiest gloom,
Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume;
Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope
Into a darkness quieted by hope;
Plucker of amaranths grown beneath God's eye
In gracious twilights where His chosen lie."

Homer and Job are at one in associating darkness with the
grave, and all that the grave implies. "Before I go whence I shall
not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of
death." Homer and Ecclesiastes are one in love of the sunlit sky:
"Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes
to behold the sun." And Shakespeare in fullest sympathy cries:

"See how the sun