"The Teutonic mind was always peculiarly moral in its directions. The Teutons' respect for woman, their morality, and their belief in one God, as well as their associated self-governments, prepared them for the reception of Christianity, and gave them great power in spreading its truth." (Races of the Old World, p. 108.)

"When God was about to cast away, as if disappointed and repenting of his work, the instruments of his grace whom, next after the Jews, he had chosen for the building of his church and the diffusion of his truth,-when he was about to humble and cast down the Greek and Roman Churches which had been called out from among the heathen of the Empire, and which had grown and prospered till they comprehended the Empire itself,—he prepared long in secret and in solitude the people, the human instruments of his policy, the human vessels of his grace, by whom he purposed to replace them.

"The Greeks and Romans-the bright and polished children of the South-had broken down through the infirmity of corruptions. Faith, accepted slowly, embraced coldly, had produced no fruit of holiness and purity, and languished in the sphere of their effete society. A new material was to be called forth; the nations of the North-Goths and Franks, Burgundians and Saxons were to be put into the place of which they had shown themselves unworthy; were to sit upon their thrones, to inherit their patrimony, to succeed to their spiritual privileges. And these nations must have their long and patient training for the task so graciously imposed upon them; these children of the new era must be separated and kept apart in holy dedication to their divine calling, howbeit themselves unconscious of their mission. They, too, like the child John, shall wax great and strong in spirit, and continue in the deserts until the day of their showing unto Christendom. Through these Northern peoples-these barbarians, as they have so often been called-we have derived our Christianity; for they took to themselves and applied to their own spiritual necessities the truth they found dishonored or forgotten in the Empire." (Merivale's "Conversion of the Northern Nations," pp. 94-96.)

"Look at the German nations, as a type of the Northern races generally; look at the earliest records we possess of them, in their

state of rude material deficiency, which we call their barbarism; when they roamed their annual course from pasture to pasture; when they had no cities, no roads, or other appliances of what we denominate civilization; when they had not yet polished their native tongue into an instrument of recorded sentiment:-still, even in the few pages consecrated to their memory by the supercilious Romans, we may trace already among them the greatest results of true moral culture. They have already acquired a deep reverential sense of spiritual things; a profound respect for the voice of God speaking with authority through human organs; a sense of divine government and providence; a conscience active and inquisitive; suspicion at least of sinfulness; apprehension of punishment; longing for forgiveness; a passion for sacrifice and atonement. They have attained a respect for human life, and a sense of responsibility in regard to it, such as shames the morbid hardheartedness of a fastidious civilization. They have secured one of the best and strongest incentives to virtuous exertion, one of the surest pledges of spiritual progress, in their fine appreciation of the worth of the female character.

"The special doctrine of the Christian Scriptures is approached at least in the Northern mythology. The revelation of Jesus Christ as the Great Sacrifice casts its shadow before it in the traditions of the Edda. Balder, as we there read, the son of Odin, is the fairest and best of beings,-beloved of gods and men. He bears, indeed, the national character of the warrior; he is the giver of strength in combat; he goes forth conquering and to conquer. But no less is he the perfect expression of innocence, holiness, and justice. He gathers in himself all the attributes of the Deity,-various and, to human views, conflicting, yet such as God has himself revealed them to us,-of justice and mercy, of love and anger, of force and persuasion. But this being, excellent and godlike, falls at last by the craft and malice of the Devil. All nature weeps; gods and men weep; all weep but the Devil only; and for the want of the tears of the Evil One he cannot return to bless men on earth with his presence. The crowning idea of redemption through the God-man's sufferings is thus crippled and curtailed: it is postponed to the future, relegated to some final dispensation, when the Evil Power, Loki, and Death, the wolf-god Fenris, shall be bound in hell forever,

and the powers of heaven shall triumph in the glorious consummation of all things.

"Such are some of the points of analogy between the traditions of the Edda and the Christian Scriptures; such the anticipations which might seem to await completion in the revelation of Jesus Christ; such the distant guidance of the Holy Spirit of God vouchsafed to the nations of the North. And they were not unworthy for whom such special ministrations should be appointed. They were prepared to accept and profit by them by their natural docility and moral tendencies, by their aptness to assimilate the lessons of material and spiritual culture.” (Ibid. pp. 99-103.)

"For four centuries they stood face to face with the great conquerors and civilizers of the South, watchful, but not subservient; emulous, but still jealously independent. Their greatest warriors had been trained in the camps of their Roman rivals. In the arts of peace the German was a skilful imitator. He built his towns, he cultivated his fields, he surrounded himself with the appliances of luxury, after the pattern learned from the masters of human civilization. Their religious ideas he quickly assimilated; he adapted their traditions to his own; imbibed their thoughts; sympathized with their aspirations.

"If, then, we admire in any work of man's hand the evidence of a cunning design, the tokens of a thoughtful foresight; if we worship reverently the hand of the Divine artificer in the adaptation of means to ends in the outward frame of nature; in the limbs of animals; in the foliage of trees; in the processes of life and death; in the structure of the universe;--not less should we remark and admire divine contrivance in the moulding of a national character for the great religious purpose to which it is destined to be applied. For ages this purpose has seemed to slumber in the breast of the All-disposer; for ages the races of the North-the barbarians, as we call them, as the Romans called them slightingly-roamed their deserts unnoticed by the trained and civilized among men. For ages no sage or seer of Greece or Rome, of Egypt or Palestine, had dreamed of the power latent in those savage regions, of the dispensation slumbering in those untutored bosoms; for the time had not yet arrived for putting them to their proper use. But God himself was still' silently

watching over them; and so they grew and waxed strong in spirit, and were in the deserts till the day of their showing to the Empire.

"That day, speaking broadly, came with great suddenness, and that manifestation might seem at once complete. The conquest of the Empire and the conversion of the Northern races might be regarded, in a general view, as one great historical event. Looking more closely, indeed, we see that, like all wide-reaching revolutions, these issues were in fact slow and gradual, the providential development of many causes and myriads of interwoven incidents. The intercourse of the rival races for four centuries along two thousand miles of frontier had been varied, and their action upon one another reciprocal. The Empire, for instance, had received the importation of many thousands of captives from the North, and to the poor captive, the desolate stranger, the tormented slave, the Gospel and the Church, embosomed in the Empire, had spoken with force and conviction. To him Jesus Christ had been father and mother, and wife and lands. The North, again, had invited an immigration of crowds of persecuted believers, fugitives from the chain and the axe, and the lions of the amphitheatre. Jesus Christ had guided their steps and lightened the burden of their pilgrimage. Rome once more had surrounded herself with legions of foreign auxiliaries, recruited from the Scythians and the Germans; and among them holy men had labored, and converted them into an army of Christ. And from these, in turn, had gone forth missionaries of the Faith, such as Ulfilas, the wolf-born, become the apostle of the barbarians, the translator of the Scriptures into the Gothic tongue,— the Moses, as he was boldly designated, of the Goths,-who had descended from the mystic presence in the holy place, from the metropolitan temple of the Holy Wisdom of God, bearing the written tidings of salvation to his admiring and expecting countrymen.

"Thus the nations of the North were gradually prepared for their complete and final conversion. The Lord had been 'preached to them that were afar off;' 'the inhabitants of the isles had been astonished at him.'" (Ibid. pp. 104-106.)

ISRAEL MOVED TO JEALOUSY.

THE Protestant Reformation was the fulfilment of the word of YAHVEH in "the song of Moses :"

"I will move them to jealousy with no people!

I will provoke them to anger with a foolish nation!"

Not only did Israel "obtain mercy" through the foolish nation (Rom. xi. 31), but they also were "provoked to anger" by the discovery that they had received a corrupted gospel from their teachers. As they were the foreordained subjects of provocation, they, and they only, could reform the adulterated religion of Rome. As they had been prepared of God to receive it, they were also prepared of God to weigh it in the balances of truth and condemn it. And hence the fact of the national limitation of the Protestant movement as thus observed by historians:

"The peculiar constitution of the German mind was apparent in its mode of receiving Christianity: there was a greater freedom of development, an endeavor to go back to the original foundations of Christianity, in opposition to Roman Traditionalism; there were already prognostics of the Reformation." (Neander's Hist. of Christian Dogmas, Bohn's ed., vol. ii. p. 421.)

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"Throughout the world, wherever the Teutonic is the groundwork of the language, the Reformation either is, or, as in Southern Germany, has been, dominant; wherever Latin, Latin Christianity has retained its ascendency." (Milman's Lat. Chris., vol. i. p. 28.)

"The Reformation originated in, and struck firm root only in, the purely German nations; outside of Germany proper it established itself in Scandinavia and England. But the Romanic and Sclavonic nations kept decidedly aloof from it. Even South Germany has only partially adopted the Reformation, a fact which is consistent with the mingling of elements which is the general characteristic of its nationality." (Hegel's Philosophy of History, Bohn's ed., p. 437.)

"The Reformation was a national as well as a moral revolt. It was not only an insurrection of the laity against the clergy, but also an insurrection of all the branches of the great German race against an alien domination. It is a most significant circumstance that no large society of which the tongue is not Teu