442 THE SAXOXS IN ENGLAND. [book r.
rest ; but more must have participated in that feel-
ing which is expressed in a Danish song,
,∙ I trust my sword, I trust my steed,
But most I trust myself at need l !”
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 OJnnn
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 Woden would have been found as ac-
tive 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
Eadwini of Northumberland sacrificed and offered
thanks to his gods upon the birth of a daughter.
Rsedwald of Eastanglia, even after his nominal con-
version, 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.
1 “ Eorst Iroer jeg mit gode svard,
og saa min gode best,
demast troer jeg mine dannesvenue,
jeg troeι mig self allerbedst.”
Малу examples are given in Grimm, Mythoi, p. 7.
са. x∏∙]
HEATHENDOM. CONCLUSION.
443
We possess no means of showing how the re-
ligion of our own progenitors or their brethren of
the continent, had been modified, purified, and
adapted in the course of centuries to a more ad-
vanced state of civilization, or the altered demands
of a higher moral nature ; but, at the commence-
ment 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 over-
come. 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 mes-
sage 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