leading points which are of interest for us here. As to their religion,
Cæsar formed a totally different opinion from Tacitus. According to the
former, the Germans knew only those visible and palpably useful gods,
the Sun and the Moon, and Fire; they had never even heard of any others
by report. Tacitus, on the contrary, says, that they worship Hercules
and Mars, and, above all, Mercury; that, at the same time, their
religious sense is eminently spiritual, for they repudiate the thought
of enshrining the celestials within walls, or representing them by the
human form; that they venerate groves and forest-glades, and that by the
names of their gods they understand mysterious beings visible only to
the inward and reverential sight. These estimates are diametrically
opposed, and they have been used by an eminent writer to illustrate the
difficulty of getting at the truth about the religion of barbarians. But
it should be remembered that a long interval had elapsed between Cæsar
and Tacitus; an interval, moreover, that was likely to work some, if not
all, of the changes required to make these estimates compatible with one
another.

Tacitus informs us about the god Tuisco, whose name we still keep in
Tuesday;[42] about the supremacy of Mercurius,[43] that is, of Woden;
and about the form of the boar as a sacred symbol, which was worn on the
person for a charm against danger.[44] He also relates the hideous
ceremony of a goddess Nerthus, or Mother Earth, who makes her occasional
progresses in a wagon drawn by cows, the attendants being slaves who,
when the rite is done, are all drowned in a mysterious lake.[45]

2. From the second source we might have expected more than we find.
Knowing that the new religion was not established without struggles and
delays and relapses, we might have expected that the traces of the dying
superstition would have been numerous in Anglo-Saxon literature. And if