With the Teutons the village had a somewhat different history. It is difficult to determine exactly to what extent it existed among them; but traces of its organization are still discoverable among the laws and customs of Germany and England. The warlike habits of the German tribes, however, soon produced a marked effect on this organization. The chief of the village, whether hereditary or elective, was under normal conditions possessed of but little power. Among a warlike people, however, the necessity for a captain or dictator must have been much greater than with peaceful tribes; for war requires, more than any other pursuit, that it should be directed by an individual mind. Among the peaceful inhabitants of India or Russia the village head-man was generally some aged and venerable father exercising a sort of paternal influence over the others through the reverence paid to his age and wisdom. The habits of the Teutons gave an excessive importance to the strength and vigour of manhood, and they learnt to regard those who exhibited the greatest skill in battle as their natural chieftains.
We have hitherto been occupied in tracing the growth of inventions which had for their end the supply of material wants, or the ordering of conditions which should enable men to live peaceably together in communities, and defend the products of their labour from the attacks of rival tribes and warlike neighbours. A very little research into the relics of antiquity, however, brings another side of human thought before us, and we discover, whether by following the revelations of language or by examining into the traces left in ancient sites, abundant proof to show that the material wants of life did not alone occupy the thoughts of our remote ancestors any more than our own, and that even while the struggle for life was fiercest, conjectures about the unseen world and the life beyond the grave, and aspirations towards the invisible source of life and light they felt to be around them, occupied a large space in their minds. God did not leave them without witness at any time, but caused the ‘invisible things to be shown by those that do appear.’ And even in the darkest ages and among the least-favoured races there were always to be found some minds that vibrated, however feebly, to the suggestions of this teaching, and shaped out for themselves and their tribe some conception of a Divine Ruler and His government of the world from those works of His hands of which their senses told them. Before commerce, or writing, or law had advanced beyond their earliest beginnings, religious rites and funeral rites had no doubt been established in every tribe, and men’s thoughts about God and His relationship to His creatures had found some verbal expression, some sort of creed in which they could be handed down from father to son and form a new tie to bind men together. The task of tracing back these rites and creeds to their earliest shape is manifestly harder than that of tracing material inventions, or laws between man and man, to their first germs, for we are here trenching on some of the deepest questions which the human mind is capable of contemplating--nothing less, indeed, than the nature of conscience and the dealings of God Himself with the souls of His creatures. We must therefore tread cautiously, be content to leave a great deal uncertain, and, making up our minds only on such points as appear to be decided by revelation, accept on others the results of present researches as still imperfect, and liable to be modified as further light on the difficult problems in consideration is obtained.