scholars, by the publication of Icelandic contemporaneous annals.  This remarkable people have furnished nearly the whole population of England by means of the successive conquests of Saxon, Danes, and Normans, driving the Keltic races into the mountainous regions of Wales and North Scotland, where their descendants still remain.  Colonizing themselves also everywhere in Northern Europe, and even in Italy and Greece, they have left the familiar stamp of their ideas and habits in all our modern civilization[325].

Sec. 2.  Idea of the Scandinavian Religion.

The central idea of the Scandinavian belief was the free struggle of soul against material obstacles, the freedom of the Divine will in its conflict with the opposing forces of nature.  The gods of the Scandinavians were always at war.  It was a system of dualism, in which sunshine, summer, and growth were waging perpetual battle with storm, snow, winter, ocean, and terrestrial fire.  As the gods, so the people.  War was their business, courage their duty, fortitude their virtue.  The conflict of life with death, of freedom with fate, of choice with necessity, of good with evil, made up their history and destiny.

This conflict in the natural world was especially apparent in the struggle, annually renewed, between summer and winter.  Therefore the light and heat gods were their friends, those of darkness and cold their enemies.  For the same reason that the burning heat of summer, Typhon, was the Satan of Egypt; so in the North the Jotuns, ice-giants, were the Scandinavian devils.

There are some virtues which are naturally associated together, such as the love of truth, the sense of justice, courage, and personal independence.  There is an opposite class of virtues in like manner naturally grouped together,—­sympathy, mutual helpfulness, and a tendency to social organization.  The serious antagonism in the moral world is that of truth and love.  Most cases of conscience which present a real difficulty resolve themselves into a conflict of truth and love.  It is hard to be true without hurting the feelings of others; it is hard to sympathize with others and not yield a little of our inward truth.  The same antagonism is found in the religions of the world.  The religions in which truth, justice, freedom, are developed tend to isolation, coldness, and hardness.  On the other hand, the religions of brotherhood and human sympathy tend to weakness, luxury, and slavery.

The religion of the German races, which was the natural growth of their organization and moral character, belonged to the first class.  It was a religion in which truth, justice, self-respect, courage, freedom, were the essential elements.  The gods were human, as in the Hellenic system, with moral attributes.  They were finite beings and limited in their powers.  They carried on a warfare with hostile and destructive agents, in which at last they were to be vanquished and destroyed, though a restoration of the world and the gods would follow that destruction.