The Undeveloped Reasoning Faculty Is Prone To Attach An
Undue Value And Meaning To The Forms Of Things, And The
Infancy Of A Nation's Mind Is Always More Ready To Worship
The MANIFESTATIONS Of A Power, Than To Look Beyond Them
For A Cause.
Was it not natural then that these northerns,
dwelling in daily communion with this grand Nature, should
fancy they
Could perceive a mysterious and independent
energy in her operations, and at last come to confound
the moral contest man feels within him, with the physical
strife he finds around him, to see in the returning
sun - fostering into renewed existence the winter-stifled
world - even more than a TYPE of that spiritual consciousness
which alone can make the dead heart stir; to discover
even more than an ANALOGY between the reign of cold,
darkness, and desolation, and the still blanker ruin of
a sin-perverted soul? But in that iron clime, amid such
awful associations, the conflict going on was too
terrible - the contending powers too visibly in presence
of each other, for the practical, conscientious Norse
mind to be content with the puny godships of a Roman
Olympus. Nectar, Sensuality, and Inextinguishable Laughter
were elements of felicity too mean for the nobler atmosphere
of their Walhalla; and to those active temperaments and
healthy minds, - invigorated and solemnized by the massive
mould of the scenery around them, - Strength, Courage,
Endurance, and above all Self-sacrifice - naturally seemed
more essential attributes of divinity than mere elegance
and beauty. And we must remember that whilst the vigorous
imagination of the north was delighting itself in creating
a stately dreamland, where it strove to blend, in a grand
world-picture - always harmonious, though not always
consistent - the influences which sustain both the physical
and moral system of its universe, an undercurrent of
sober Gothic common sense induced it - as a kind of protest
against the too material interpretation of the symbolism
it had employed - to wind up its religious scheme by
sweeping into the chaos of oblivion all the glorious
fabric it had evoked, and proclaiming - in the place of
the transient gods and perishable heaven of its
Asgaard - that One undivided Deity, at whose approach the
pillars of Walhalla were to fall, and Odin and his peers
to perish, with all the subtle machinery of their existence;
while man - himself immortal - was summoned to receive at
the hands of the Eternal All-Father the sentence that
waited upon his deeds. It is true this purer system
belonged only to the early ages. As in the case of every
false religion, the symbolism of the Scandinavian mythology
lost with each succeeding generation something of its
transparency, and at last degenerated into a gross
superstition. But traces still remained, even down to
the times of Christian ascendency, of the deep,
philosophical spirit in which it had been originally
conceived; and through its homely imagery there ran a
vein of tender humour, such as still characterises the
warm-hearted, laughter-loving northern races.
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