328
THE SAXONS IN ENGLAND.
[book I.
viction of his responsibility to higher powers than
any which he recognized in the world around him?
There has been, and yet is, religion without the
pale of Christianity, however dim and meagre and
unsatisfactory that religion may appear to us whom
the mercy of God has blessed with the true light of
the Gospel. Long before their conversion, all the
Germanic nations had established polities and states
^upon an enduring basis,—upon principles which
still form the groundwork and stablest foundation of
the greatest empires of the world,—upon principles
which, far from being abrogated by Christianity,
harmonize with its purest precepts. They who
think states accidental, and would eliminate Provi-
dence from the world, may attempt to reconcile this
truth with their doctrine of barbarism ; to us be it
permitted to believe that, in the scheme of an all-
wise and all-pervading mercy, one condition here
below may be the fitting preparation for a higher ;
and that even Paganism itself may sometimes be
only as the twilight, through which the first rays of
the morning sun are dimly descried in their pro-
gress to the horizon. Without religion never was
yet state founded, which could endure for ages ;
the permanence of our own is the most convincing
proof of the strong foundations on which the mas-
sive fabric, from the first, was reared.
The business of this chapter is with the heathen-
dom of the Saxons; not thatjɔortion of it which
yet subsists among us in many of our most che-
rished superstitions, some of which long lurked in
the ritual of the unreformed church, and may yet
CH. ɪɪɪ-j
HEATHENDOM.
329
lurk in the habits and belief of many Protestants ;
but that which was the acknowledged creed of the
Saxon, as it was of other Germanic populations ;
which once had priests and altars, a ritual and ce-
remonies, temples and sacrifices, and all the pomp
and power of a church-establishment.
The proper subjects of mythological inquiry are
the gods and godlike heroes : it is through the lat-
ter—for the most part, forms of the gods them-
selves—that a race connects itself with the former.
Among the nations of our race royalty is indeed
iure diυino, for the ruling families are in direct
genealogical descent from divinity, and the posses-
sion of Woden’s blood was the indispensable con-
dition of kingship. In our peculiar system, the
vague records of Tuisco, the earth-born god ɪ, and
Man, the origin and founders of the race, have
vanished ; the mystical cosmogony of Scandinavia
has Ieftno traces among us2; but we have neverthe-
less a mythological scheme which probably yielded
neither in completeness nor imaginative power to
those of the German or the Norwegian.
In the following pages I propose to take into
consideration, first the Gods and Goddesses, pro-
perly so called : secondly, the Monsters or Titanic
powers of our old creed : thirdly, the intermediate
ɪ “ Célébrant carminibus antiquis .... Tuisconem deum terra editum
et filium Mannum, originem gentis Conditoresque.” Germ. ii. So sung
the earliest Greeks : i
ɑvrlðtov δc ∏cλα<ryo∣' iv iψικoμoι<rιv 5pt<rσι
yaia μi∖aιv avtηκev ιva θvητωv ytvos (a).
’ There is no better account of this than Geijer gives in his History
of Sweden, vol. i. passim.