free, because his baptism was the badge of foreign conquest, and neither
pope nor kaiser should lord it over him, body or soul. St. Olaf, indeed,
forced Christianity on the Norse at the sword's point, often by horrid
cruelties, and perished in the attempt. But who forced it on the
Norsemen of Scotland, England, Ireland, Neustria, Russia, and all the
Eastern Baltic? It was absorbed and in most cases, I believe, gradually
and willingly, as a gospel and good news to hearts worn out with the
storm of their own passions. And whence came their Christianity? Much
of it, as in the case of the Danes, and still more of the French Normans,
came direct from Rome, the city which, let them defy its influence as
they would, was still the fount of all theology, as well as of all
civilisation. But I must believe that much of it came from that
mysterious ancient Western Church, the Church of St. Patric, St. Bridget,
St. Columba, which had covered with rude cells and chapels the rocky
islets of the North Atlantic, even to Iceland itself. Even to Iceland;
for when that island was first discovered, about A.D. 840, the Norsemen
found in an isle, on the east and west and elsewhere, Irish books and
bells and wooden crosses, and named that island Papey, the isle of the
popes--some little colony of monks, who lived by fishing, and who are
said to have left the land when the Norsemen settled in it. Let us
believe, for it is consonant with reason and experience, that the sight
of those poor monks, plundered and massacred again and again by the
"mailed swarms of Lochlin," yet never exterminated, but springing up
again in the same place, ready for fresh massacre, a sacred plant which
God had planted, and which no rage of man could trample out--let us
believe, I say, that that sight taught at last to the buccaneers of the
old world that there was a purer manliness, a loftier heroism, than the
ferocious self-assertion of the Berserker, even the heroism of humility,
gentleness, self-restraint, self-sacrifice; that there was a strength
which was made perfect in weakness; a glory, not of the sword but of the