times, must be reckoned
the Viking and the Norseman, the followers of Guthrum, of Ivar, of
Hrolf, not less than the followers of Cerdic and of Cymric. To the
religious consciousness of the Jutes, Angles and Saxons, the Vikings
bring a religious consciousness as deep and serious. The struggle
against the Danes and Normans is not a struggle of English against
foreigners; it is a conflict for political supremacy amongst men of the
same race, who ultimately grow together into the England of the
fourteenth century. In the light of the future, the struggle of the
ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries does but continue the conflicts of
the Heptarchic kings. To this land of England the Vikings have the
right which the followers of Cerdic and Cynric had--the right of
supremacy, the right which the _will_ to possess it and the resolution
to die for that will, confers.

Sec. 3. DISTINCTION OF THE RELIGION OF THE VIKINGS

The religion of the Vikings was the converse of their courage.
Aristotle remarks profoundly that the race which cannot quit itself
like a man in war cannot do any great thing in philosophy. Religion is
the philosophy of the warrior. And the scanty records of the Vikings,
the character of Knut, for instance, or that of the Conqueror, attest
the principle that the thoughts of the valiant about God penetrate more
deeply than the thoughts of the dastard. The Normans, who close the
English _Welt-wanderung_, who close the merely formative period of
England, illustrate this conspicuously. If the sombre fury of the
Winwaed displays the stern depths of religious conviction in the
vanguard of our race, if the Eddas and Myths argue a religious
earnestness not less deep in the Vikings, the high seriousness of the
religious emotion of the Norseman is not less clearly attested. Europe
of the eleventh century holds three men, each of heroic proportions,
each a Teuton in blood--Hildebrand, Robert Guiscard, and William the
Conqueror. In intellectual vision, in spiritual insight, Hildebrand
has few parallels in history. He is the founder of the Mediaeval
Papacy, realizing in its orders of monks, priests, and crusaders a
State not without singular resemblances to that which Plato pondered.
Like Napoleon and like Buonarroti, Hildebrand had the power, during the
execution of one gigantic design, of producing others of not less
astonishing vastness, to reinforce or supplant the first should it
fail. One of his design