But him dare I not
Venture to name.
Few further may look
Than to where Odin
To meet the wolf goes.
Odin goes to meet the Fenriswolf in Ragnarok (the twilight of the gods; that is, the final conflict between all good and evil powers); but now let the reader compare the above passage from the Elder Edda with the following passage from the seventeenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles:
Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars' Hill and said: Ye
men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious;
for as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found
an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.
Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.
It was of this same unknown God that one of the
ancient Greek poets had said, that in him we live and
move and have our being. Thus did the Greeks find
Jehovah in the labyrinth of their heathen deities; and
when we claim that the Norse mythology is more
divine than any other system of mythology known, we
mean by this assertion, that the supreme God is mentioned
and referred to oftener, and stands out in bolder
relief in the Norseman's heathen belief, than in any
other.
It is a noticeable fact that long before Christianity was introduced or had even been heard of in Iceland, it is recorded that Ingemund the Old, a heathen Norseman, bleeding and dying, prayed God to forgive Rolleif, his murderer.
Another man of the heathen times, Thorkel Maane, a supreme judge of Iceland, a man of unblemished life and distinguished among the wisest magistrates of that
