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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: peace and purity, to pray for him whom neither warnings nor caresses
will amend? It is a sad book, "Sintram." And yet not too sad. For
they were a sad people, those old Norse forefathers of ours. Their
Christianity was sad; their minsters sad; there are few sadder,
though few grander, buildings than a Norman church.
And yet, perhaps, their Christianity did not make them sad. It was
but the other and the healthier side of that sadness which they had
as heathens. Read which you will of the old sagas--heathen or half-
Christian--the Eyrbiggia, Viga Glum, Burnt Niall, Grettir the
Strong, and, above all, Snorri Sturluson's "Heimskringla" itself--
and you will see at once how sad they are. There is, in the old
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