Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/369

Rh bridge Chinvat, made by Ahura-Mazda, whither souls of the dead on their way to give account of their deeds in life must come, the good to pass over, the wicked to fall into the abyss; to this day the Parsi declares in solemn confession of his faith, that he is wholly without doubt in the stepping over the bridge Chinvat. Perhaps it was from this Persian source that the myth found its way into Rabbinical literature, and into the accepted belief of Islam. Over the midst of the Moslem Hell stretches the bridge Es-Sirat, finer than a hair, and sharper than the edge of a sword. There all souls of the dead must pass along, but while the good reach the other side in safety, the wicked fall off into the abyss.

In Scandinavian mythology, the bridge on the Hell-way, where the pale unsubstantial dead ride over the river Gjöll, is part and parcel of the myth of Baldur in the Prose Edda. But it seems rather from the Oriental group just described, that the ideas of the bridge in Christian Europe had their source. The "Brig of Dread, na brader than a thread," sung of in the grand old Lyke-Wake Dirge of our North Country, was a recognized part of the architecture of Purgatory and Hell, to be seen and even passed over by the ecstatic explorers whose visions of the future state were a staple commodity of pious literature in the middle ages. It is thus described when Owayne Miles, one of King Stephen's Knights, descends into St. Patrick's Purgatory:—