and aversion to the converted Christian. This is not the place to
describe the long struggle between the new and the old faith in the
North; how kings and queens became the foster-fathers and nursing-
mothers of the Church; how the great chiefs, each a little king in
himself, scorned and derided the whole scheme as altogether weak and
effeminate; how the bulk of the people were sullen and suspicious,
and often broke out into heathen mutiny; how kings rose and kings
fell, just as they took one or the other side; and how, finally,
after a contest which had lasted altogether more than three
centuries, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Sweden--we run them over in
the order of conversion--became faithful to Christianity, as preached
by the missionaries of the Church of Rome. One fact, however, we must
insist on, which might be inferred, indeed, both from the nature of
the struggle itself, and the character of Rome; and that is, that
throughout there was something in the process of conversion of the
nature of a compromise--of what we may call the great principle of
'give and take'. In all Christian churches, indeed, and in none so
much as the Church of Rome, nothing is so austere, so elevating, and
so grand, as the uncompromising tone in which the great dogmas of the
Faith are enunciated and proclaimed. Nothing is more magnificent, in
short, than the theory of Christianity; but nothing is more mean and
miserable than the time-serving way in which those dogmas are dragged
down to the dull level of daily life, and that sublime theory reduced
to ordinary practice. At Rome, it was true that the Pope could
congratulate the faithful that whole nations in the barbarous and
frozen North had been added to the true fold, and that Odin's grim
champions now universally believed in the gospel of peace and love.
It is so easy to dispose of a doubtful struggle in a single sentence,
and so tempting to believe it when once written. But in the North,
the state of things, and the manner of proceeding, were entirely