eyes, and the story of this process 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 Björnson, 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 Björnson 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 Björnson 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