The Training of the Race.—­The climate is a potent factor in determining the vigor and characteristics of a race.  Nature reared the Teuton like a wise but not indulgent parent.  By every method known to her, she endeavored to render him fit to colonize and sway the world.  Summer paid him but a brief visit.  His companions were the frost, the fluttering snowflake, the stinging hail.  For music, instead of the soft notes of a shepherd’s pipe under blue Italian or Grecian skies, he listened to the north wind whistling among the bare branches, or to the roar of an angry northern sea upon the bleak coast.

The feeble could not withstand the rigor of such a climate, in the absence of the comforts of civilization.  Only the strongest in each generation survived; and these transmitted to their children increasing vigor.  Warfare was incessant not only with nature but also with the surrounding tribes.  Nature kept the Teuton in such a school until he seemed fit to colonize the world and to produce a literature that would appeal to humanity in every age.

The Early Teutonic Religion.—­In the early days on the continent, before the Teuton had learned of Christianity, his religious beliefs received their most pronounced coloring from the rigors of his northern climate, from the Frost Giants, the personified forces of evil, with whom he battled.  The kindly, life-bringing spring and summer, which seemed to him earth’s redeeming divinity, were soon slain by the arrows that came from the winter’s quivers.  Not even Thor, the wielder of the thunderbolt, nor Woden, the All-Father, delayed the inevitable hour when the dusk of winter came, when the voice of Baldur could no longer be heard awaking earth to a new life.  The approach of the “twilight of the gods,” the Goetterdaemmerung, was a stern reality to the Teuton.

[Illustration:  WODEN.]

Although instinct with gloomy fatalism, this religion taught bravery.  None but the brave were invited to Valhalla to become Woden’s guest.  The brave man might perish, but even then he won victory; for he was invited to sit with heroes at the table of the gods.  “None but the brave deserves the fair,” is merely a modern softened rendering of the old spirit.

The Christian religion, which was brought to the Teuton after he had come to England, found him already cast in a semi-heroic mold.  But before he could proceed on his matchless career of world conquest, before he could produce a Shakespeare and plant his flag in the sunshine of every land, it was necessary for this new faith to develop in him the belief that a man of high ideals, working in unison with the divinity that shapes his end, may rise superior to fate and be given the strength to overcome the powers of evil and to mold the world to his will.  The intensity of this faith, swaying an energetic race naturally fitted to respond to the great moral forces of the universe, has enabled the Anglo-Saxon to produce the