ory who commissioned the monk Augustine to venture on this glorious service. Yet so fierce and savage, according to the common rumor, were the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain, that Augustine shrank from the wild and desperate enterprise; he hesitated before he would throw himself into the midst of a race of barbarous unbelievers, of whose language he was ignorant. Gregory would allow no retreat from a mission which he had himself been prepared to undertake, and which would not have appalled, even under less favorable circumstances, his firmer courage.

The fears of Augustine as to this wild and unknown land proved exaggerated. The monk and his forty followers landed without opposition on the shores of Britain. They sent to announce themselves as a solemn embassage from Rome, to offer to the King of Kent the everlasting bliss of heaven, an eternal kingdom in the presence of the true and living God. To Ethelbert, though not unacquainted with Christianity, for, by the terms of his marriage, Bertha, the Frankish princess, had stipulated for the free exercise of her religion, there must have been something strange and imposing in the landing of these peaceful missionaries on a shore still constantly swarming with fierce pirates, who came to plunder or to settle among their German kindred. The name of Rome must have sounded, though vague, yet awful, to the ear of the barbarian. Any dim knowledge of Christianity which he had acquired from his Frankish wife would be blended with mysterious veneration for the pope, the great high-priest, the vicar of Christ and of God upon earth. With the cunning suspicion which mingles with the dread of the barbarian, the king insisted that the first meeting should be in the open air, as giving less scope for magic arts, and not under the roof of a house. Augustine and his followers met the king with all the pomp which they could command, with a crucifix of silver in the van of their procession, a picture of the Redeemer borne aloft, and chanting their litanies for the salvation of the king

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and his people. "Your words and offers," replied the king, are fair; but they are new to me, and, as yet, unproved; I cannot abandon at once the faith of my Anglian ancestors." But the missionaries were entertained with courteous hospitality. Their severely monastic lives, their constant prayers, fastings, and vigils, with their confident demeanor, impressed more and more favorably the barbaric mind. Rumor attributed to them many miracles. Before long the king of Kent was an avowed convert; his example was followed by many of his noblest subjects. No compulsion was used, but it was manifest that the royal favor inclined to those who received the royal faith.

The British Church, secluded in the fastnesses of Wales, could not but hear of the arrival of the Roman missionaries, and of their success in the conversion of the Saxons. Augustine and his followers could not but inquire with deep interest concerning their Christian brethren in the remote parts of the island. It was natural that they should enter into communication; unhappily they met to dispute on points of difference, not to join in harmonious fellowship on the broad grounds of their common Christianity. The British Church followed the Greek usage in the celebration of Easter; they had some other points of ceremonial, which, with their descent, they traced to the East; and the zealous missionaries of Gregory could not comprehend the uncharitable inactivity of the British Christians, which had withheld the blessings of the Gospel from their pagan conquerors. The Roman

and the British clergy met, it is said, in solemn synod. The Romans demanded submission to their discipline, and the implicit adoption of the western ceremonial on the contested points. The British bishops demurred; Augustine proposed to place the issue of the dispute on the decision of a miracle. The miracle was duly performed—a blind man brought forward and restored to sight. But the miracle made not the slightest impression on the obdurate Britons. They demanded

True Christianity,

a second meeting and resolved to put the Christianity of the strangers to a singular test, a moral proof with them more convincing than an apparent miracle. they said, "is meek and lowly of heart. Such will be this man (Augustine), if he be a man of God. If he be haughty and ungentle he is not of God, and we may disregard his words. Let the Romans arrive first at the synod. If on our approach he rises from his seat to receive us with meekness and humility, he is the servant of Christ, and we will obey him. If he despises us and remains seated, let us despise him." Augustine sat, as they drew near, in unbending dignity. The Britons at once refused obedience to his commands, and disclaimed him as their metropolitan. The indignant Augustine (to prove his more genuine Christianity) burst out into stern denunciations of their guilt in not having preached the Gospel to their enemies. He prophesied-a prophecy which could hardly fail to hasten its own fulfillment --the divine vengeance by the arms of the Saxons. So complete was the alienation, so entirely did the Anglo-Saxon clergy espouse the fierce animosities of the Anglo-Saxons, and even imbitter them by their theologic hatred, that the gentle Beda relates with triumph, as a manifest proof of the divine wrath against the refractory Britons, a great victory. over that wicked race, preceded by a massacre of twelve hundred British clergy, chiefly monks of Bangor, who stood aloof on an eminence praying for the success of their countrymen.

IV.

THE EARLY MONASTERIES.-ALLEN.

[The religious activity of the time showed itself mainly in the planting and endowment of monastic colonies, which gradually transformed the face of the country. "In this monastic movement two strangely contrasted impulses worked together to change the very aspect of the new England and the new English society. The one was the passion for solitude, the first outcome of the religious impulse given by the conversion; a passion for communing apart with themselves and with God, which drove men into waste and woodland and desolate fen. The other was the equally new passion for social life on the part of the nation at large; the outcome of its settlement and well-doing on the conquered soil, and yet more of the influence of the new religion, coming as it did from the social civilization of the older world, and invariably drawing men together by the very form of its worship and its belief."]

It was mainly by means of the monasteries that Christianity became a great civilizing and teaching agency in England. Those who judge monastic institutions only by their later and worst days, when they had, perhaps, ceased to perform any useful function, are apt to forget the benefits which they corferred upon the people in the earlier stages of their existence. The state of England during this first Christian period was one of chronic and bloody warfare. There was no regular army, but every freeman was a soldier, and raids of one English tribe upon another were every-day occurrences; while pillaging frays on the part of the Welsh, followed by savage reprisals on the part of the English, were still more frequent. We catch glimpses, from time to time, of the unceasing strife between each folk and its neighbors, besides many hints of intestine struggles between prince and prince, or of rivalries between one petty shire and others of the same kingdom.

With such a state of affairs as this it became a matter of deep importance that there should be some one institution

where the arts of peace might be carried on in safety, where agriculture might be sure of its reward, where literature and science might be studied, and where civilizing influences might be safe from interruption or rapine. The monasteries gave an opportunity for such an ameliorating influence to spring up. They were spared, even in war, by the reverence of the people for the Church; and they became places where peaceful minds might retire for honest work and learning and thinking, away from the fierce turmoil of a still essentially barbaric and predatory community. At the same time they encouraged the development of this very type of mind by turning the reproach of cowardice, which it would have carried with it in heathen times, into an honor and a mark of holiness. Every monastery became a center of light and of struggling culture for the surrounding district. They were at once, to the early English recluse, universities and refuges, places of education, of retirement, and of peace in the midst of a jarring and discordant world.

In the Roman south many, if not all, of the monasteries seem to have been planned on the regular models; but in the north, where the Irish missionaries had borne the largest share in the work of conversion, the monasteries were irregular bodies on the Irish plan, where an abbot or abbess ruled over a mixed community of monks and nuns. Hild, a member of the Northumbrian princely family, founded such an abbey at Streoneshalch (Whitby), made memorable by numbering among its members. the first known English poet, Caedmon. St. John of Beverley, Bishop of Hexham, set up a similar monastery at the place with which his name is so closely associated. The Irish monks themselves founded others at Lindisfarne and elsewhere. Even in the south some Irish abbeys existed. In process of time, however, as the union with Rome grew stronger, all these houses conformed to the more regular usage, and became monasteries of the ordinary Benedictine type.