hort, which is a universal mark of
slavery.

[1] I owe this ingenious explanation to a note in Mr. Andrew
Lang's essays prefixed to Mr. Holland's translation of
Aristotle's _Politics_. He has there also suggested the
analysis of the clan names for traces of Totemism, whose
results I have given above in part.

Thus we may divide the early English religion into four elements. First,
the remnants of a very primitive savage faith, represented by the
sanctity of animals and plants, by Totemism, by the needfire, and by the
use of amulets, charms, and spells. Second, the relics of the old common
Aryan nature-worship, found in the reverence paid to Thunor, or Thunder,
who is a form of Zeus, and in the sacredness of hills, rivers, wells,
fords, and the open air. Third, a system of Teutonic hero or
ancestor-worship, typified by Woden, Baeldaeg, and the other great names
of the genealogies, and having its origin in the belief in ghosts.
Fourth, a deification of certain abstract ideas, such as War, Fate,
Victory, and Death. But the average heathen Anglo-Saxon religion was
merely a vast mass of superstition, a dark and gloomy terrorism,
begotten of the vague dread of misfortune which barbarians naturally
feel in a half-peopled land, where war and massacre are the highest
business of every man's lifetime, and a violent death the ordinary way
in which he meets his end.

CHAPTER IX.

THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH.

It was impossible that a country lying within sight of the orthodox
Frankish kingdom, and enclosed between two Christian Churches on either
side, should long remain in such a state of isolated heathendom. For to
be cut off from Christendom was to be cut off from the whole social,
political, intellectual, and commercial life of the civilised world. In
Britain, as distinctly as in the Pacific Islands in our own day, the
missionary was the pioneer of civilisation. The change which
Christianity wrought in England in a few generations was almost as
enormous as the change which it has wrought in Hawaii at the present
time. Before the arrival of the missionary, there was no written
literature, no industrial arts, no peace, no social intercourse between
district and district. The church came as a teacher and civiliser, and
in a few years the barbarous heathen English warrior had settled down
into a toilsome agriculturist, an eager scholar, a peaceful law-giver,
or an earnest priest. The change was