Beginning presumably with a simple rever ence and dread for the beneficial and harmful forces of outward Nature, they had advanced with a more highly developed social organi zation to a more elaborate system of personal deities. Three central ideas seem to have been common to the several tribal groups into which the people thought of themselves as divided. The god of War (Thin, Thiwas), the god of the Storm (Wotan, Odin), and a goddess of Fertility (Freya) appear in a• variety of forms and have their history of local adherence, of diffusion and of adoption. These figures are distinct enough to have left their names on days of the week and to have attracted the attention of Roman observers. In the descrip tions of Casar and Tacitus they appear re spectively as Mars, Hercules,. and Isis, so that we may be quite sure that at the beginning of our era these principal figures had taken on a fairly definite shape. They were accompanied by a world of secondary mythological creations, spirits of the air, the forest, and the stream, giants, dwarfs, and other half-human personali ties. Later, and especially among the Teutons of the far north, there was added the concep tion of a cosmos created out of nothing, and, as the climax of the system, appears another • equally vivid notion of an ultimate cataclysm in which gods and universe alike shall be over whelmed.
In their dealings with the unseen powers the Germans seem not to have evolved or needed any formal ritual in the hands of an organized, mediatorial priesthood. The chiefs of the family or the tribe performed the neces sary sacrifices by which the favor of the gods was propitiated or their wrath averted. No theology or speculative development of these original simple• ideas was ever reached. The whole system bears the marks of a fresh, vigor ous and spontaneous expression of intimacy between conquering freeman and the divine governance under which they liVed. The con flicts of the gods, their spacious repose in Wal halla, reflect the ideals of a race which from our earliest glimpses of it appears in a slow but steady movement upward toward higher levels of social, economic, and spiritual experi ence. ' Thus equipped the Germanic peoples enter upon their fateful contact with the Romans. In the course • of this contact, whether in the form of Roman military or commercial visits to them, or in their own military service in the Roman armies, they may have undergone a species of religious disintegration such as often accompanies profound changes of national ex perience. The ancient gods of the tribe could not long maintain their hold on the affections of a people whose tribal life was shattered to its foundation by the manifold reactions of the Roman culture. It was probably this weaken ing of the ancient ties of religion that com bined with the more obvious political•notives to bring about the transition to Christianity.
It is an undoubted fact that all those Ger man tribes which left their ancient homes be yond the Rhine and the Danube and moved in mass southward and westward on to the lands of Rome. had already at the time of this occu pation become converted to the religion of Christ. The process of this conversion is, however, almost entirely obscure. Among the Greek and Roman populations Christianity had made its way for three centuries, wholly by the method of individual conviction, and even during the 4th century, after the weight of imperial pressure had been added, the same process had gone on. Christianity had made its appeal to these highly developed peoples as a system of thought and as a rule of life. To the uncultured and intellectually undisciplined Germans such an appeal seems obviously im possible. They encountered Christianity long after it had entered upon its institutional stage. They met it as one of those governmental agencies by which Rome seemed to have grown great, and adopted it as a new means of great ness for themselves. Once adopted they clung to it with unshaken loyalty and gradually came to understand its spirit. Further these same peoples,— the migrating tribes in stricter sense, including the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgun dians, Vandals, and Lombards,— were all con verted to the Arian form of Christianity, that form which was condemned by the first General Council at Nicam (325), but which continued during the next two centuries, under various disguises, to maintain a powerful hold on East ern speculative thought. Attempts have been made to show that this doctrinal divergence of the Germans is to be accounted for by some spiritual affinity between their mental attitude and that of the Arian agencies through which they received the new faith. It does not, how ever, seem likely that it is to be explained on any intellectual grounds whatever. Their con version took place mainly from the East at a time when Arianism was dominant at Constan tinople, and it was altogether in accord with their stage of religious culture that they should take what was offered them without nice dis crimination. Later, long after their settlement in their respective homes on Roman soil, such of these tribes as survived changed their form of Christianity to that which had then, under the leadership of the bishops of Rome, come to be dominant in the western world. But one really striking figure emerges out of the ob scurity of this period, that of Ulfila the Visi with, whose translation of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures from Greek into a written Gothic language which he himself invented for the purpose, remains the most important docu ment of the conversion, precious alike to the theologian and the philologist. A copy written in silver letters upon purple parchment and known as the ((Silver Codex)) is in the library of the University at Upsala, Sweden.