I can readily believe that the warrior and the noble were less deeply impressed with the religious idea than the simple cultivator. In the first place, the disturbed life and active habits of military adventurers are not favourable to the growth of religious convictions: again, there is no tie more potent than that which links sacred associations to particular localities, and acts, unconsciously perhaps but pervasively, upon all the dwellers near the holy spots: the tribe may wander with all its wealth of thought and feeling; even its gods may accompany it to a new settlement; but the religio loci, the indefinable influence of the local association, cannot be transported. Habits of self-reliance, of a proud and scornful independence, are not consistent with the conviction of weakness, which is necessary to our full admission of the divine pre-eminence; and the self-confident soldier often felt that he could cope with gods such as his had been described to be. In the Greek heroic lay Tydides could attack, defeat, and even wound Ares: I do not know that the Teutonic mythology ever went so far as this; but we have abundant record of a contemptuous disregard with which particular heroes of tradition treated the popular religion. Some selected indeed one god in whom they placed especial trust, and whom they worshipped (as far as they worshipped at all) to the exclusion of the rest; but more must have participated in that feeling which is expressed in a Danish song,
“I trust my sword, I trust my steed,
But most I trust myself at need[[830]]!”
while to many we may safely apply what is said of a Swedish prince, “han var mikit blandinn i trunni,” he was mightily confused in his belief. Still it is certain that a personal character was attributed to the gods, as well as an immediate intervention in the affairs of life. The actual presence of Oþinn from time to time on the battle-field, in the storm, in the domestic privacy of the household, was firmly believed, in Scandinavia; and it is reasonable to assume that Wóden would have been found as active among our German progenitors, had not the earlier introduction of Christianity into Teutonic Europe deprived us of the mythological records which the North supplies. Beda tells us that Eádwini of Northumberland sacrificed and offered thanks to his gods upon the birth of a daughter. Rǽdwald of Eastanglia, even after his nominal conversion, continued to pay his offerings to idols, and the people of Essex, when labouring under the ravages of a pestilence, abjured the faith of Christ and returned to the service of the ancient gods. But in the personality of God alone resides the possibility of realizing the religious idea.
We possess no means of showing how the religion of our own progenitors or their brethren of the continent, had been modified, purified, and adapted in the course of centuries to a more advanced state of civilization, or the altered demands of a higher moral nature; but, at the commencement of the sixth century we do find the pregnant fact, that Christianity met but little resistance among them, and enjoyed an easy triumph, or at the worst a careless acquiescence, even among those whose pagan sympathies could not be totally overcome. Two suppositions, indeed, can alone explain the facile apostasy to or from Christianity, which marked the career of the earliest converts. Either from a conviction of the inefficacy of heathendom had proceeded a general indifference to religious sanctions, which does not appear to answer other conditions of the problem, or the moral demands of the new faith did not seem to the Saxons more onerous than those to which they were accustomed; for it is the amount of self-sacrifice which a religion successfully imposes upon its votaries, which can alone form a measure of its influence. The fact that a god had perished, could sound strangely in the ears of no worshipper of Baldr; the great message of consolation,—that he had perished to save sinful, suffering man,—justified the ways of God, and added an awful meaning to the old mythus. An earnest, thinking pagan, would, I must believe, joyfully accept a version of his own creed, which offered so inestimable a boon, in addition to what he had heretofore possessed. The final destruction of the earth by fire could present no difficulties to those who had heard of Surtr and the Twilight of the Gods, or of Allfather’s glorious kingdom, raised on the ruin of the intermediate divinities. A state of happiness or punishment in a life to come was no novelty to him who had shuddered at the idea of Nástrond: Loki or Grendel had smoothed the way for Satan. Those who had believed in runes and incantations were satisfied with the efficacy of the mass; a crowd of saints might be invoked in place of a crowd of subordinate divinities; the holy places had lost none of their sanctity; the holy buildings had not been levelled with the ground, but dedicated in another name; the pagan sacrifices had not been totally abolished, but only converted into festal occasions, where the new Christians might eat and drink, and continue to praise God: Hréðe and Eóstre, Wóden, Tiw and Fricge, Ðunor and Sætere retained their places in the calendar of months and days: Erce was still invoked in spells, Wyrd still wove the web of destiny; and while Wóden retained his place at the head of the royal genealogies, the highest offices of the Christian church were offered to compensate the noble class for the loss of their old sacerdotal functions. How should Christianity fail to obtain access where Paganism stepped half way to meet it, and it could hold out so many outward points of union to paganism?
We dare not question the decrees of omnipotence, or enquire into the mysterious operations of omniscient God; it is not for us to measure his infinite wisdom by the rules of our finite intelligence, or to assume that his goodness and mercy can be appreciated and comprehended by the dim, wavering light of our reason; but man feels that in every age man has had a common nature, a common hope and a common end of being; and we shall do no wrong either to philosophy or to religion, if we believe that even in the errors of paganism there lay the germs of truth; and that the light which lighteth every one that cometh into the world, was vouchsafed in such form and measure as best to subserve the all-wise, all-holy, and all-merciful objects of creation!
[608]. “Celebrant carminibus antiquis.... Tuisconem deum terrâ editum et filium Mannum, originem gentis conditoresque.” Germ. ii. So sung the earliest Greeks:
ἀντίθεον δὲ Πέλασγον ἐν ὑψικομοῖσιν ὅρεσσι
γαῖα μέλαιν’ ἀνέηκεν ἵνα θνήτων γένος εἴη.