( SUFFERED UNDER PONTIUS PILATE; WAS CRUCIFIED, DEAD, AND BURIED.'

BURIED.

HERE I profess my belief that the only begotten and eternal Son of God, for the confirmation of the reality of His death which was past, and of His resurrection from the dead suddenly to follow, had His body, according to the custom of the Jews, prepared for a funeral, bound up with linen clothes, and laid in spices. And that, after that usual preparation, it was laid in a sepulchre hewn out of a rock, in which never man was laid before, and by the rolling of a stone unto the door of it, entombed there.

Our belief in this part of the article appears to be necessary, because it gives testimony and assurance of the truth of Christ's death and also of His resurrection. Men are not put into the earth before they die. Pilate was very inquisitive whether our Saviour had been any while dead, and was fully satisfied by the centurion before he would give the body to Joseph to be interred. There can be no true resurrection where there has been no death. That we might therefore believe that Christ truly rose from the dead, we must be first assured that He died; and a greater assurance of His death than this we cannot have, that His body was by His enemies taken down from the cross, and laid by His disciples in the grave.

A profession of belief in Christ buried is also necessary to work in us a correspondence to and likeness of His burial. For we are buried with Him in baptism unto death; that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.'

Further, His devout and honourable burial may teach us that they err who would think the dead remains of us mortals unworthy the respect and reverence which has ever been paid them; not only among Christian

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PART 2.

people, but, in the main, among heathens also. The heathen respected the dead bodies of men in reference to the souls that formerly inhabited them. How much more shall we reverence those who have not only been the living temples of the Holy Ghost, but which shall one day be raised again, and made like unto His glorious body, Who bought them with His precious blood?"

After Hakon's death, Gunhild's sons came back to reign in Norway, and brought civil war and anarchy and wasteful times with them. All the good effected by the consolidation of the country under Harald Fair-hair, and by Hakon's wise legislation, they set themselves to undo as fast as they could. Each district of Norway had again its independent king; and as they vied with each other in keeping showy courts about them, and were obliged, in self-defence, to maintain large bodies of armed men, they were all more intent on squeezing money out of the unhappy chiefs and bonders, than on upholding the laws, or promoting the general prosperity of the land.

Harald, the eldest of the family, surnamed Grey-skin, because he wrapt himself in a grey wolf's skin one day, and so made wolf-skin mantles fashionable throughout the country, was considered head-king; but his brothers paid very little obedience to him, and his witch-mother,

Gunhild, took upon herself to interfere frequently in public business. It grieved her sorely that Godrud and Tryggve should still continue to rule the districts Hakon had given them, and that Sigurd, Earl of Lade, should have been permitted to seize the Drontheim district, and hold it without paying either duty or homage to her sons.

'I wonder at your want of spirit,' she said to her sons one day when they were all talking over their affairs together. Your grandfather, Harald Fair-hair, thought nothing of taking a sub-king's or an earl's life, when it stood in the way of his subduing the whole country; but you let strangers settle themselves in the best parts of your heritage, while you go about making Viking cruises in foreign parts!"

'But you should consider, Mother,' answered Harald Grey-skin, 'that it is not just as easy to slay Earl Sigurd as to kill a kid or a calf. All the Drontheim people hold with him. It would fare ill with us if we went among them, after attempting anything against Earl Sigurd.'

'Trust me,' the cunning woman replied, 'to find some way of getting rid of him without your putting yourselves in danger.'

After this, Gunhild laid many snares to entangle Earl Sigurd; but he was too wily an old fellow to be quickly caught off his guard.

At length she managed to gain over to her side a foolish brother of the earl's; and by his treachery Sigurd was betrayed into the hands of Gunhild's soldiers. They had the cruelty to set fire to a house where he was celebrating one of his favourite harvest-feasts, and to burn him alive in it, with about two hundred of his followers.

Gunhild's

Sigurd's death happened just ten years after Hakon's. treachery in compassing it, instead of increasing the power of her sons, raised a new host of foes against them, and plunged the country into a fiercer civil war than it had yet known.

Sigurd had a son called Earl Hakon. He was as brave, as wily, as staunch a worshipper of Odin, as his father; as much beloved by the Drontheim people; and, having his father's cruel death to avenge, a yet more determined enemy to Gunhild's family.

Many years of bitter warfare followed between him and them; and the unhappy country people were reduced to the last degree of misery by the constant raids of the contending parties on each other's dominions. Sometimes Gunhild's sons had the best of it, and Earl Hakon had to slip off in his ships to Denmark, leaving them to pillage and burn and slay all the summer in Drontheim District; but the next year Earl Hakon would come back with a fresh pirate band, and avenge himself by killing Gunhild's friends and ravaging their property.

To make things worse for the poor Norwegian people, the seasons seemed to set themselves against the unnatural warfare, and to refuse to follow their usual course. Corn would not grow on the blood-stained fields; fish would not swim to the shores always echoing with battle shouts; spring forgot to bring soft winds and sunshine; and the snow remained in the valleys till midsummer. The people began to think that

the reign of the Frost Giants had returned, and that all the snow and ice of Ginnungagap had fallen upon them. Even the bards paused in their battle-songs to describe this sad state of things. Here are four lines of what Eyvind Skaldaspillan, the greatest scald of the time, wrote one summer morning when he came out of his house, and found the fields, where his cattle ought to have been feeding, all covered with deep

snow:

''Tis midsummer, yet deep snows rest
On Odin's mother's frozen breast:
Like Laplanders, our cattle kind
In stall or stable we must bind.'

In the course of the war, the two sub-kings, Godrud and Tryggve, who had taken part with Earl Hakon, were killed, as were also several of Harald Grey-skin's younger brothers. At length Grey-skin himself fell in a battle with a Danish chief, called Gold-Harald, whom subtle Earl Hakon had contrived to draw into the quarrel, and induce to fight his battles for him. After Grey-skin's death, Gunhild, with two surviving sons, once more fled to the Orkney Isles, whence they did not return again to reign in Norway.

The Danish King, who had furnished Gold-Harald with the troops that had defeated Grey-skin, now seized the head kingship and all the southern provinces of Norway for himself; and Earl Hakon took possession of the Midland and Upland districts, where his father Sigurd had always had so much influence.

You have heard of this crafty earl before: he is the man who defeated the Jomsburg Vikings, and had such dark dealing with the witch. Thorgerd Hordabrud. He was all his life a sturdy obstinate old heathen, as his father had been before him, but not altogether a bad governor for the Drontheim districts, in the state they then were. Some sort of order came back to the country under his strong rule. The fields got sown; the harvests were gathered; fish-boats put out into the fiords; and scalds were no longer obliged to part with their silver bracelets to buy herrings as Eyvind tells us he had to do in the evil times of Gunhild's

sons.

Hakon's hatred to Christianity came out in a very terrible way on one occasion. Otto Emperor of Germany made war on Denmark; and the Danish King, Harald Gormson, sent for Hakon, to help him to defend his country. After many repulses, Otto effected an entrance into Jutland, and would not evacuate the country till he had persuaded, or rather compelled, the Danish King and all his army to accept Christianity and receive Baptism.

Earl Hakon, in ignorance of what was going on, marched up to the Danish camp while this peculiar form of truce-making was in progress. Sorely against his inclination, he and all his men had to take part in the Baptism ceremony; and when they again set sail for Norway, the Emperor compelled them to take a band of priests and learned men on

board, who were to instruct them further in the religion they had professed. Hakon had little relish for such company. As soon as a wind rose, he put all the learned men on shore again, and started off as quickly as he could without them; but instead of sailing direct to his own districts, he landed in Gotland, which belonged to the Danish King, with whom he was now offended. There he offered a blood-sacrifice to Odin; and marched through the country, pillaging, burning, and slaying, wherever he went, till he reached his own territory, in order to show his disapprobation of the Danish King's ready acceptance of the new faith, and to wash away any tincture of Christianity that might be supposed to linger about him and his followers after their Baptism. Whether this fierce rejection of better teaching had any share in deteriorating Hakon's character, I do not know; but it is certain that he did grow more cruel and tyrannical as time went on-till at length his crimes began to wear so dark a complexion, that even his own heathen subjects were revolted by them, and began to look round on every side for some deliverance.

The last of Gunhild's sons was now dead, and there seemed little likelihood that a scion of the true Yngling race would ever again reign in Norway. The chiefs and bonders, who had understood Hakon the Good's policy well enough to be really anxious to see their country united and independent, must have begun to despair. Yet all the time the true prince, who was destined to lay the foundations of a free and Christian kingdom in Norway, was growing up, and learning the lessons requisite to fit him for his kingship.

To understand this, we must now go back a little.

You will remember I told you that the two sub-kings, Tryggve and Godrud, both grandsons of Harald Fair-hair, had been killed in the war between Earl Hakon and Gunhild's sons. Tryggve had a wife called Astrid, who, when she heard the news of her husband's death, fled from her home, which she knew would be ravaged by Gunhild's soldiers, and, with her faithful foster-father Thoralf and one or two servants, hid herself in a desert island in the middle of a lake. It was summer time when she had to fly, luckily for her; so a desert island life was not quite as bad as it might have been. A little baby was born to her in her island; and she remained safe in her hiding-place till the nights began to be long and cold, when she was obliged to return to the mainland in search of warmer shelter for herself and her baby. The spies of Queen Gunhild, who had by this time heard rumours of the birth of the poor little beggar prince, were by this time scouring the country in search of him to put him to death; so Astrid had to proceed very warily. By day she journeyed along the least frequented wood-paths, carrying her baby, or letting good old Thoralf carry it; by night she begged shelter in the most solitary farm-houses she could meet with. One cold night, a rich inhospitable bonder drove her from his door back into the woods again; and an hour after, Gunhild's spies came to that very place to look for her. The churlish bonder told the spies he had just driven a beggar