There is an open space on the flat top of an overhanging rock, darkly terrible even today and still the favorite haunt of century old oaks: and this place tradition points out as the spot upon which human sacrifices were of old offered to Thor and to Odin. And thither the blue eyed barbarians dragged those Roman soldiers, bravest of the brave, who had stood entrenched behind their helpless steel until exhaustion overcame them and who at last overpowered by sheer force of numbers, had been taken alive by the implacable foe and dragged to the altar of sacrifice. Strange indeed is that delusion, so often inextricably assimilable with religious fanaticism, wherein a man makes himself believe that he honors or placates Deity by immolating thereto his own enemy! Truly the human-heart god is the deification of its own desires. And that God-man upon the Cross who is essentially the everlasting antithesis of the desires of the human heart is not of man. We can understand Jove and Juno and Mars and Venus and even Odin and Thor--they are ourselves only more so: not so the Christ crucified on Calvary. EFFECTS. Fifteen thousand eight hundred men are estimated to have formed the army lost in the Teutoberger Wald. This irreparable loss gave to the heart of Cæsar Augustus its pathetic cry enduring even to the day of death, “Varus, Varus, give back my legions, Varus!” Suetonius tells us that at the news of the Black Forest disaster, Augustus, in bitter grief, beat his head against the wall crying incessantly and inconsolably, “Bring back my legions, Varus”: and that after many years had passed and even to the day of his death he lamented the loss as irreparable. Not, indeed, because so many men had fallen; Rome was prodigal of human life; but because his prophetic eye saw in this defeat the beginning of the end of Roman supremacy; the change of policy from aggressive to defensive; the fatal turning of a tide which should roll down upon southern Europe in inundations of desolation. Many other ancient writers attest the seriousness of this defeat to Rome and corroborate what Suetonius says as to its effect upon Augustus. Dion Cassius says, “Then Augustus, when he heard the calamity of Varus, rent his garment, and was in great affliction for the troops he had lost, and for terror respecting the Germans and the Gauls. And his chief alarm was, that he expected them to push on against Italy and Rome; and there were no Roman youth fit for military duty that were worth speaking of, and the allied populations that were at all serviceable had been wasted away.” Florus also expresses its effects: “_Hac clade factum est ut imperium quod in litore oceani non steterat, in ripa Rheni fluminis staret_.” (The result of this disaster was that the empire which had not been content that it be bounded by the shore of ocean was forced to accept as its boundary the River Rhine). ARMINIUS.