For centuries they fought--always on German soil--the legions often repulsed, yet pressing on and on, until a chain of Roman fortresses stretched from the Rhine to the Baltic, and the people were held--not subjugated--by Roman power. About the year 100 of our era there arose the first heroic figure in the history of Germany, when Hermann made a prodigious but ineffectual attempt to consolidate his people and expel the Romans. The colossal statue only recently erected in Germany, is a tribute to the unhappy hero of eighteen centuries ago. At the time of this attempt the Germans had learned much from the superior civilization by which they were invaded. They were no longer the barbarous race which had trampled down the vineyards of northern Italy two hundred years before. Nor was this lesson in civilization yet over. For five hundred years Teuton and Roman continued the struggle. The one by the process growing wiser, richer in resource, and in supplementing his rude strength with the finer methods of old civilizations, becoming a more and more dangerous adversary; while the other saw himself more and more enfeebled, and, wearied with the conflict, felt decrepitude stealing surely over him. In the year 300 the Teutons had ramified into six branches--the Burgundians, Thuringians, Franks, Saxons, Allemani, and Goths--all one in race, but each with its own distinct traits and life. The Allemani were so called from _aller-mannen_--all men; seeming to signify that this tribe was composed of the fragments of many tribes. Why this tribal name should have become that of the whole German nation is not apparent. Obviously the word Allemagne has this origin, just as Deutsch may be as readily traced to Teuton. But of these six tribes it was the Goths who first adopted Christianity, and took on the forms of a higher civilization. CHAPTER III. As some winged seed is wafted from a fair garden into a dark, distant forest, and there takes root and blossoms, so was the seed-germ of Christianity caught by the wind of destiny, and carried from Palestine to the heart of pagan Germany, where, strange to say, it found congenial soil. The story is a romantic one. A Christian boy in Asia Minor, while straying on the shores of the Mediterranean, was captured by some Goths, who took their fair-haired prize home to their own land, and named him Ulfila. The boy, with his heart all aflame for the religion in which he had been nurtured, told his captors the story of Calvary--of Christ and His gospel of peace and love--and lived to see the terrible sacrificial altars replaced by the Cross.