is the substance of the book.  Regeneration is not wholly achieved, but the end leaves us hopeful for the future; and the flags that fly over town and harbor in the closing chapter have a symbolical significance, for they announce a victory of spirit over sense, not alone in the case of certain individuals, but also in the case of the whole community with which they are identified.  If this book comes to be forgotten as a novel (which is not likely), it will have a fair chance of being remembered, along with ‘Levana’ and ‘Emile,’ as a sort of educational classic.  ‘Paa Gud’s Veje,’ the last great work of Bjoernson, is also strongly didactic in tone, yet it attains at its highest to a tranquillity of which the author seemed for many years to have lost the secret.  The struggle it depicts is that between religious bigotry and liberalism as they contend for the mastery in a Norwegian town; and the moral is that “God’s way” is the way of people who order their lives aright and keep their souls sweet and pure, rather than the way of the Pharisee who pins his faith to observances and allows the letter of his religion to overshadow the spirit.  Not an unchristian inculcation, surely; yet for it and for similar earlier utterances Bjoernson has been held up as Antichrist by the ministers of a narrow Lutheran orthodoxy, very much as the spokesmen of an antiquated caste-system of society have esteemed his ideas to be those of the most ruthless and radical of iconoclasts.  But he is a stout fighter, and attacks of this sort only serve to arouse him to new energy.  And so he toils manfully on for the enlightenment of his people, knowing that his cause is the cause of civilization itself—­of a rational social organization, an exalted ethical standard, and a purified religion.

Since the period when Bjoernson began to merge the artist in the thinker and prophet, his work has given a strong impetus to progress in religious, educational, and political affairs.  As regards the first of these matters, it must be remembered that the sort of intolerance with which he has had to contend more resembles that of eighteenth-century New England puritanism than anything we are familiar with in our own time.  As for the second matter, all of his work may in a sense be called educational, while such a book as ‘Det Flager’ shows how closely he has considered the subject of education in its special and even technical aspects.  Finally, as a political thinker, he has identified himself indissolubly with the movement for the establishment of an independent Norwegian Republic, although he is not sanguine of the near realization of this aim.  But if time should justify his prophetic attitude and give birth to a republic in the north of Europe, however remote may be the event, the name of Bjoernson will be remembered as that of one of the founders, although as the Mazzini rather than as the Cavour of the Norse Risorgimento.  And whatever may be the future of the land that claims him for her own, his spirit will walk abroad long after he has ceased to live among men.  His large, genial, optimistic personality is of the sort that cannot fail to stamp itself upon other generations than the one that actually counts him among its members.