sons energy of character and ideals.

[Sidenote: Transplanted religions.]

Ideas especially are light baggage, and travel with migrant peoples
over many a long and rough road. They are wafted like winged seed by the
wind, and strike root in regions where they could never have originated.
Few classes of ideas bear so plainly the geographic stamp of their
origin as religious ones, yet none have spread more widely. The abstract
monotheism sprung from the bare grasslands of western Asia made slow but
final headway against the exuberant forest gods of the early Germans.
Religious ideas travel far from their seedbeds along established lines
of communication. We have the almost amusing episode of the brawny
Burgundians of the fifth century, who received the Arian form of
Christianity by way of the Danube highway from the schools of Athens and
Alexandria, valiantly supporting the niceties of Greek religious thought
against the Roman version of the faith which came up the Rhone Valley.

If the sacred literature of Judaism and Christianity take weak hold upon
the western mind, this is largely because it is written in the symbolism
of the pastoral nomad. Its figures of speech reflect life in deserts and
grasslands. For these figures the western mind has few or vague
corresponding ideas. It loses, therefore, half the import, for instance,
of the Twenty-third Psalm, that picture of the nomad shepherd guiding
his flock across parched and trackless plains, to bring them at evening,
weary, hungry, thirsty, to the fresh pastures and waving palms of some
oasis, whose green tints stand out in vivid contrast to the tawny wastes
of the encompassing sands. "He leadeth me beside the still waters," not
the noisy rushing stream of the rainy lands, but the quiet desert pool
that reflects the stars. What real significance has the tropical