True Christianity,

Such will be this If he be haughty

If on our

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. man (Augustine), if he be a man of God. and ungentle he is not of God, and we may disregard his words. Let the Romans arrive first at the synod. 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.

The civilizing value of the monasteries can hardly be overrated. Secure in the peace conferred upon them by a religious sanction, the monks became the builders of schools, the drainers of marsh-land, the clearers of forest, the tillers of heath. Many of the earliest religious houses rose in the midst of what had been trackless wilds. Peterborough and Ely grew up on islands of the fen county. Crowland gathered round the cell of Guthlac in the midst of a desolate mere. Evesham occupied a glade in the wild forests of the western march. Glastonbury, an old Welsh foundation, stood on a solitary islet where the abrupt knoll of the Tor looks down upon the broad waste of the Somersetshire marshes. Beverley, as its name imports, had been a haunt of beavers before the monks began to till its fruitful dingles. In every case agriculture soon turned the wild lands into orchards and corn-fields, or drove drains through the fens which converted their marshes into meadows and pastures for the long-horned English cattle.

Roman architecture, too, came with the Roman Church. We hear nothing before of stone buildings; but Eadwine erected a church of stone at York, under the direction of Paulinus; and Bishop Wilfrith, a generation later, restored and decorated it, covering the roof with lead and filling the windows with panes of glass. Masons had already been settled in Kent, though Benedict, the founder of Wearmouth and Jarrow, found it desirable to bring over others from the Franks. Metal-working had always been a special gift of the English, and their gold jewelry was well made even before the conversion, but it became still more noticeable after the monks took the craft into their own hands. Beda mentions mines of copper, iron, lead, silver, and jet. Abbot Benedict not only brought manuscripts from Rome, which were copied and imitated in his monasteries at Wearmouth and Jarrow, but he also brought over glass-blowers, who introduced the art of glass-making into England. Cuthbreht, Beda's scholar, writes to Lull, asking for workmen who

can make glass vessels. Bells appear to have been equally early introductions. Roman music, of course, accompanied the Roman liturgy. The connection established with the clergy of the continent favored the dispersion of European goods throughout England. We constantly hear of presents, consisting of skilled handicraft, passing from the civilized south to the rude and barbaric north. Wilfrith and Benedict journeyed several times to and from Rome, enlarging their own minds by intercourse with Roman society, and returning laden with works of art or manuscripts of value. Beda was acquainted with the writings of all the chief classical poets. and philosophers, whom he often quotes. We can only liken the results of such intercourse to those which, in our own time, have proceeded from the opening of Japan to western ideas, or of the Hawaiian Islands to European civilization and European missionaries. The English school, which soon sprang up at Rome, and the Latin schools, which soon sprang up at York and Canterbury, are precise equivalents of the educational movements in both those countries which we see in our own day. The monks were to learn Latin and Greek as well as they learned their own tongue," and were so to be given the key of all the literature and all the science that the world then possessed.

66

The monasteries thus became real manufacturing, agricultural, and literary centers on a small scale. The monks boiled down the salt of the brine-pits; they copied and illuminated manuscripts in the library; they painted pictures not without rude merit of their own; they ran rhines through the marshy moorlands; they tilled the soil with vigor and success. A new culture began to occupy the land -the culture whose fully-developed form we now see around us. But it must never be forgotten that in its origin it is wholly Roman and not at all Anglo-Saxon. Our people showed themselves singularly apt at embracing it, like the modern Polynesians, and unlike the American Indians; but