Thor dwells in a mansion in the clouds. The thunder we hear in the sky is the noise of his chariot wheels, and the flashes of lightning are from his hammer which he dashes against the mountains. The "Britannica" says: "Some of the monks of a later period endeavored to persuade the Northmen that in Thor their forefathers had worshiped Christ, the strong and mighty Savior of the oppressed, and that his mallet was the rude form of the cross." "The sign of the hammer," says "Chambers," "was analogous to that of the cross among Christians." Baldur. One of the purest, one of the gentlest, and one of the best beloved of all the gods was Baldur, the beautiful son of Odin and Freya. In him were combined all things good and noble. The envious gods, inspired by Loki, shot their arrows at him in vain until the blind god Hoder pierced his body with an arrow of mistletoe and he passed into the power of Hel, the pallid goddess of death. Sometime--when the old order of things has passed away--in another and better world, where envy, and hatred, and war are unknown, Baldur will live again. "The death of Baldur," says Prof. Rasmus B. Anderson, the highest authority on Norse mythology, "forms the turning point in the great drama.... While he lived the power of the asas (gods) was secure, but when Baldur, at the instigation of Loki, was slain, the fall of creation could not be prevented." Writing of Norse mythology, Andrew Lang says: "There is, almost undoubtedly, a touch of Christian dawn on the figure and myth of the pure and beloved and ill-fated god Baldur, and his descent into hell." Odin, and Thor, and Baldur, and their divine companions are worshiped no longer; but their religion has left a deep impress on the religion that supplanted it. The Christianity of Scandinavia, of northern Germany, of England, and of America, the whole of Protestant Christianity, in short, and to some extent Catholicism itself, has been modified by this strange and fascinating faith. Regarding this subject "Chambers' Encyclopedia" says: "So deep-rooted was the adhesion to the faith of Odin in the North, that the early Christian teachers, unable to eradicate the old ideas, were driven to the expedient of trying to give them a coloring of Christianity." The selection of December 25th as the date of the Nativity was doubtless suggested by the Mithraic or some other solar worship of the East, but the Protestant Christmas came from the North. The mistletoe with which Baldur was slain reappears in this festival. The fire wheel, a remnant of the old Norse sun worship, existed among German Christians until the nineteenth century. The burning of the Yule log still survives. In some provinces of Germany the festival is still called by its Pagan name.