They had no caste of priests, nor were they, when first known to the Romans, accustomed to offer sacrifice.  It must be confessed that in a later age, a single victim, a criminal or a prisoner, was occasionally immolated.  The purity of their religion was soon stained by their Celtic neighborhood.  In the course of the Roman dominion it became contaminated, and at last profoundly depraved.  The fantastic intermixture of Roman mythology with the gloomy but modified superstition of Romanized Celts was not favorable to the simple character of German theology.  The entire extirpation, thus brought about, of any conceivable system of religion, prepared the way for a true revelation.  Within that little river territory, amid those obscure morasses of the Rhine and Scheld, three great forms of religion—­the sanguinary superstition of the Druid, the sensuous polytheism of the Roman, the elevated but dimly groping creed of the German, stood for centuries, face to face, until, having mutually debased and destroyed each other, they all faded away in the pure light of Christianity.

Thus contrasted were Gaul and German in religious and political systems.  The difference was no less remarkable in their social characteristics.  The Gaul was singularly unchaste.  The marriage state was almost unknown.  Many tribes lived in most revolting and incestuous concubinage; brethren, parents, and children, having wives in common.  The German was loyal as the Celt was dissolute.  Alone among barbarians, he contented himself with a single wife, save that a few dignitaries, from motives of policy, were permitted a larger number.  On the marriage day the German offered presents to his bride—­not the bracelets and golden necklaces with which the Gaul adorned his fair-haired concubine, but oxen and a bridled horse, a sword, a shield, and a spear-symbols that thenceforward she was to share his labors and to become a portion of himself.

They differed, too, in the honors paid to the dead.  The funerals of the Gauls were pompous.  Both burned the corpse, but the Celt cast into the flames the favorite animals, and even the most cherished slaves and dependents of the master.  Vast monuments of stone or piles of earth were raised above the ashes of the dead.  Scattered relics of the Celtic age are yet visible throughout Europe, in these huge but unsightly memorials,

The German was not ambitious at the grave.  He threw neither garments nor odors upon the funeral pyre, but the arms and the war-horse of the departed were burned and buried with him.

The turf was his only sepulchre, the memory of his valor his only monument.  Even tears were forbidden to the men.  “It was esteemed honorable,” says the historian, “for women to lament, for men to remember.”