excuse in St Paul's maxim of making herself 'all things to all men.'
Thus, when a second attempt to Christianize Iceland proved more
successful--for in the meantime, King Olof Tryggvason, a zealous
Christian, had seized as hostages all the Icelanders of family and
fame who happened to be in Norway, and thus worked on the feelings of
the chiefs of those families at home, who in their turn bribed the
lawman who presided over the Great Assembly to pronounce in favour of
the new Faith--even then the adherents of the old religion were
allowed to perform its rites in secret, and two old heathen practices
only were expressly prohibited, the exposure of infants and the
eating of horseflesh, for horses were sacred animals, and the heathen
ate their flesh after they had been solemnly sacrificed to the gods.
As a matter of fact, it is far easier to change a form of religion
than to extirpate a faith. The first indeed is no easy matter, as
those students of history well know who are acquainted with the
tenacity with which a large proportion of the English nation clung to
the Church of Rome, long after the State had declared for the
Reformation. But to change the faith of a whole nation in block and
bulk on the instant, was a thing contrary to the ordinary working of
Providence and unknown even in the days of miracles, though the days
of miracles had long ceased when Rome advanced against the North.
There it was more politic to raise a cross in the grove where the
Sacred Tree had once stood, and to point to the sacred emblem which
had supplanted the old object of national adoration, when the
populace came at certain seasons with songs and dances to perform
their heathen rites. Near the cross soon rose a church; and both were
girt by a cemetery, the soil of which was doubly sacred as a heathen
fane and a Christian sanctuary, and where alone the bodies of the
faithful could repose in peace. But the songs and dances, and
processions in the church-yard round the cross, continued long after