94 
luxury, and violent end, parallels with strange exactitude what 
is recorded of the poet-tyrants of the Greek colonies ; and in 
reading it we find it almost impossible to realize that one is being 
introduced to an inhabitant of that barren and desolate land that 
lies just under the Arctic Circle. The introduction of Christi- 
anity was the ruin of all this intellectual splendour. The light 
of Norse imagination refused to burn in the dingy lanterns in 
which the monks proposed to hide it, and no sooner was the 
pagan worship extinct than the decay of literary production 
came, and a merely critical epoch set in. It is, doubtless, an 
instructive question to ask ourselves, — why has the spread of 
Christian truth been in so many parts of the world a death- 
blow to the fine arts? Shall we call the results in Greece, in 
Rome, in Iceland, in Europe after the Reformation, a mere 
string of coincidences ? or shall we confess that when God 
speaks to the nations with a special voice of awakening, it is 
needful that the beautiful, innocent arts that occupy them 
should for a while be put aside, and the whole attention of the 
earnest-minded be given to the things that are essential to 
Ilis Kingdom? It would seem so; and as all of us in our 
graver moments would confess it is Luther and not Rafaelle, 
Wickliffe and not Chaucer, for whom as men and as Christians 
we have to thank God most, it seems to me to show little 
wisdom to regret, as many writers have done, that the beau- 
tiful literary arts of the Noi'th were destroyed by the in- 
troduction of Christianity, since, though that Christianity 
was indeed a wretched twilight of monkish superstition, it 
paved the way for the brighter light of the Reformation, and 
made it possible for Norway, that had once seen Snorre Stur- 
lesen’s dragon, with its gilded mast and its silken sails, glide 
out of the Trondhjem Fjord, to watch from the same shores the 
humble bark of Hans Egede and his beautiful wife Gertrude 
sail out to carry the Gospel to the miserable savages of 
Greenland. 
14. The position of women among the Scandinavian nations 
presents some very interesting peculiarities. It was one of the 
noblest sides of the Northern character that appeared when the 
fate of a woman was discussed. All through the Sagas we 
find foreshadowed the principles of that chivalry by which the 
Norman descendants of the Vikingar succeeded in infusing 
some degree of moral purity and poetic grace into the sordid 
life of the Middle Ages. It was the Norseman’s creed that 
there existed something sacred and divine in woman ; and in 
consequence he treated his wife and daughters with gentleness 
