eveloped the absolute necessity of other
powers to protect the weak, to repress crime, and to guide in the
essential steps of nations emerging from darkness into light. With all
nations advancing from barbarism, the process has ever been slow by
which the civil authority has been separated from the military. It is
impossible to educe from the chaos of those times any established
principles. Often the duke or leader was chosen with imposing
ceremonies. Some men of commanding abilities would gather into their
hands the reins of almost unlimited power, and would transmit that
power to their sons. Others were chiefs but in name.

We have but dim glimpses of the early religion of this people. In the
sixth century they are represented as regarding with awe the deity
whom they designated as the creator of thunder. The spectacle of the
majestic storms which swept their plains and the lightning bolts
hurled from an invisible hand, deeply impressed these untutored
people. They endeavored to appease the anger of the supreme being by
the sacrifice of bulls and other animals. They also peopled the
groves, the fountains, the rivers with deities; statues were rudely
chiseled, into which they supposed the spirits of their gods entered,
and which they worshiped. They deemed the supreme being himself too
elevated for direct human adoration, and only ventured to approach him
through gods of a secondary order. They believed in a fallen spirit, a
god of evil, who was the author of all the calamities which afflict
the human race.

The polished Greeks chiseled their idols, from snow-white marble, into
the most exquisite proportions of the human form. Many they invested
with all the charms of loveliness, and endowed them with the most
amiable attributes. The voluptuous Venus and the laurel-crowned
Bacchus were their gods. But the Sclavonians, regarding their deities
only as possessors of power and objects of terror, carved their idols
gigantic in stature, and hideous in aspect.

From these rude, scattered and discordant populations, the empire of
Russia quite suddenly sprang into being. Its birth was one of the most
extraordinary events history has transmitted to us. We have seen that
the Normans, dwelling along the southern and eastern shores of the
Baltic, and visiting the most distant coasts with their commercial and
predatory fleets, had attained a degree of power, intelligence and
culture, which gave them a decided preeminence over the