progress, a power that turned to its own uses the civilization of the past, and almost wholly determined the character of modern history. They highly esteemed independence and honor. In their estimate of woman they stood above the people of antiquity, and the home was held sacred. They possessed a practical and earnest spirit, an inborn dislike for mere formalism, and a regard for essentials that later developed in scientific discovery and independence of thought. The Teuton had a nature in which ideas took a firm root, and he had a profoundly religious spirit, impressible by great religious truths. He listened to the rustle of the oak leaves in his sacred groves, as did the Greeks at Dodona, and they whispered to him of mysterious powers that manifested themselves through nature. The scalds, the old Teutonic poets, sang in weird runic rhymes of the valorous deeds of their ancestors.
How the Teutons hurled themselves against the barriers of the Roman Empire, how they overran the fields of Italy, how they absorbed and assimilated to their own nature what was best in the civilization of the ancients, how they formed the nuclei of the modern nations, how the renaissance of the ancient literature and art in Italy spread over Western Europe and reached England, and later an offshoot was transplanted to American soil—these and similar themes constitute some of the most interesting portions of history. Not least important is the fact that the Roman world gave the Teutons the religion of Christ, that highest development of faith in things not seen, which, to the mind of many a searcher in rational theology, is a necessary part of a complete plan, to a belief in which we are led by a profoundly
