Page:Origin and Growth of Religion (Rhys).djvu/244

228 magicians and medicine-men acting as priests, showed themselves proner to superstition and lent themselves more readily to spiritual thraldom; but, on the other hand, some of the modern students of institutions would probably tell us that a community where the chiefs discharged both civil and religious functions was on a lower level of civilization and culture than one in which they belonged respectively to different persons. This might be said doubtless to apply to the Celts and the Teutons of Caesar's time, since the former were more advanced in culture than the latter, owing, if to nothing else, to their standing in closer connection with the centres of Mediterranean civilization. In ancient Rome, the differentiation alluded to was greatly advanced by the abolition of the office of king and the transference of his civil functions to the consuls, his religious duties being left to one who continued to be called king, that is to say, the Rex Sacrorum. The Teutonic nations might, perhaps, have in their own way and their own time effected a complete differentiation of state and religion; but the fact that they have not gone further than they have in that direction, would seem to be somehow connected with the state of political development they had reached when their institutions came under the influence of Christianity; and their comparative independence of a priesthood having been then, as it were, stereotyped, may be taken as the historical antecedent of the wholesome intolerance they have on many subsequent occasions evinced in the matter of priestly rule.

This manner of reasoning would, however, presuppose Celts and Teutons to be of the same race, which would be doubtless true of their common origin in so far as they