great men; love, venerate and bow down submissive before great men: nay
can we honestly bow down to anything else? Ah, does not every true man
feel that he is himself made higher by doing reverence to what is really
above him? No nobler or more blessed feeling dwells in man's heart. And
to me it is very cheering to consider that no sceptical logic, or general
triviality, insincerity and aridity of any Time and its influences can
destroy this noble inborn loyalty and worship that is in man. In times of
unbelief, which soon have to become times of revolution, much down-rushing,
sorrowful decay and ruin is visible to everybody. For myself in these
days, I seem to see in this indestructibility of Hero-worship the
everlasting adamant lower than which the confused wreck of revolutionary
things cannot fall. The confused wreck of things crumbling and even
crashing and tumbling all round us in these revolutionary ages, will get
down so far; _no_ farther. It is an eternal corner-stone, from which they
can begin to build themselves up again. That man, in some sense or other,
worships Heroes; that we all of us reverence and must ever reverence Great
Men: this is, to me, the living rock amid all rushings-down
whatsoever;--the one fixed point in modern revolutionary history, otherwise
as if bottomless and shoreless.


So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of
it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still
divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still
worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan
religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth. I think
Scandinavian Paganism, to us here, is more interesting than any other. It
is, for one thing, the latest; it continued in these regions of Europe till
the eleventh century: eight hundred years ago the Norwegians were still
worshippers of Odin. It is interesting also as the creed of our fathers;