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THE MAKING OF THE 
 CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 

 ^r.. 
 
 MAY 20 19] 
 
 The Making of the 
 Church of England 
 
 (A.D. 597-1087) 
 
 A Course of Historical Ledures 
 
 BY 
 
 THOMAS ALLEN TIDBALL, D.D, 
 
 SOMETIME PROFESSOR OF ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY 
 
 IN THE UNIVERSITY OF THE SOUTH, SEWANEE 
 
 NOW SPECLIL LECTURER IN EARLY ENGLISH 
 
 CHURCH HISTORY^ AUTHOR OF "CHRIST 
 
 IN THE NEW TESTAMENT." 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 The Stratford Company, Publishers 
 1919 
 
Copyright 1919 
 
 The STRATFORD CO.; Publishers 
 
 Boston, Mass. 
 
 The Alpine Press, Boston, Mass., U. S. A. 
 
DEDICATED 
 
 TO 
 
 THE DEAE AND GRACIOUS MEMORY 
 
 OF 
 
 MARY JOSEPHINE TIDBALL 
 
 AND TO 
 
 MARY COLLINGWOOD TUCKER 
 
PREFACE 
 
 WHILE I was Professor of Ecclesiastical His- 
 tory in the Theological Department of the 
 University of the South, it was my custom to lecture 
 to the Senior Class on the History of the Church of 
 England in general. But I gave special attention to 
 Early English Church History in particular, from the 
 Foundation of that Church in A. D. 597 to the Nor- 
 man Conquest about five hundred years later. Under 
 the Title of ''The Making of the Church of Eng- 
 land," I have given for twelve years a Course of 
 Lectures based upon the Sources and upon the best 
 Authorities, Ancient and Modern, but put into a 
 popular form and in familiar colloquial language. I 
 have delivered these Lectures not only to my Classes, 
 but to Summer Schools of Theology, and to other 
 more popular audiences, and have always been asked 
 to publish them. When I resigned my Professorship 
 a few years ago, I was asked by my students and by 
 the University authorities to retain a Special Lecture- 
 ship in Early English Church History, which I now 
 hold. But, as I am about to retire altogether, I take 
 this method of complying with the wishes of my for- 
 mer students and other friends. 
 
 In connection with the Lectures to the Senior Class 
 I assigned to them Parallel Readmgs in the best 
 books on the subject — first and foremost, of course, 
 Bede's "Ecclesiastical History of the English Na- 
 
 vii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 tion, ' ' and, as a companion to that, * ' The Anglo-Saxon 
 Chronicle." Coming down to the best recent His- 
 tories of this period, they were expected to read the 
 greater part of William Bright 's "Chapters in Early- 
 English Church History," or else the more recent 
 and equally valuable book of William Hunt on ' ' The 
 English Church from Its Foundation to the Norman 
 Conquest. ' ' 
 
 Besides this reading on the part of the students, 
 I gave them in my Lectures much of the cream of 
 these and other valuable books in numerous Quota- 
 tions. And, as these quotations constitute the best 
 part of the Lectures, they are incorporated into the 
 body of this book, rather than consigned to the ob- 
 scurity of foot-notes or appendices, on the principle 
 that the cream should be on the top of the milk, and 
 not at the bottom. 
 
 In addition to these more formal Lectures, in order 
 that "no guilty man might escape," I was always 
 giving what I called "Free and Easy Catechetical 
 Lectures ' ' on the Text of some good Text-Book, Wake- 
 man 's or Patterson's, which the students were ex- 
 pected to study. By these varied methods I tried 
 to make sure that every student should learn some- 
 thing of English Church History, and should acquire 
 some familiarity with the best Literature on the sub- 
 ject. 
 
 These Lectures were not written nor published for 
 learned scholars, but for intelligent and educated 
 students who have had neither the time nor the op- 
 portunity to read the voluminous works of the great 
 
 viii 
 
PREFACE 
 
 Historians. This book is intended as a popular In- 
 troduction to the real Historians of the Period treated, 
 in the hope that it may serve as ''stepping-stones to 
 higher things" and may tempt its readers to go far- 
 ther and fare better. 
 
 Thomas Allen Tidball 
 Sewanee, March 3, 1918. 
 
 IX 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE PAGE 
 
 I. A Prelude Concerning the Old British 
 and Other Keltic Churches in Great 
 Britain and Ireland Before the Coming 
 of Augustine 1 
 
 (a) The Beginnings of the Church in 
 
 Britain. 
 
 (b) The Beginnings of the Church in 
 
 Ireland. 
 
 (c) The Beginnings of the Church in 
 
 Scotland. 
 
 II. The Coming of Augustine, and the 
 
 Roman Mission to the English. . 41 
 
 III. The Coming of Aidan, and the Scotch- 
 
 Irish Mission to the English . . 79 
 
 IV. The Coming-Together of the Roman and 
 y the Scotch-Irish Missions to Make the 
 
 English Church. . . . .109 
 
 V. The Coming of Theodore, and the Organ- 
 ization of the Early English Church. 136 
 
 VI. The Coming of the Danes, and the Ruin 
 
 and Revival of the English Church. 168 
 
 VII. The Coming of the Normans, and the In- 
 crease of Papal Power in the English 
 Church 199 
 
 xi 
 
'^ 
 
A Prelude to the Making of the 
 
 Church of England 
 
 I 
 
 The Old British and Other Keltic Churches in 
 
 Great Britain and Ireland Before the 
 
 Coming of Augustine 
 
 The Beginnings of the Church in Britain. 
 
 I am to speak to you on **The Making of the 
 Church of England." The subject is one of special 
 interest to Churchmen, clerical and lay, but concerns 
 also a far larger circle than our particular house- 
 hold of faith. The history of this Church is so 
 interwoven with the whole history of England itself 
 that the two studies cannot be separated without 
 serious loss to each. In the introduction to the first 
 volume of the largest and completest recent 
 ** History of the English Church,'* edited by the 
 late Dean Stephens and the Rev. William Hunt, 
 Mr. Hunt declares, ''The English Church has exer- 
 cised a profound influence on the history of the 
 English people. It was a principal agent in the 
 making of the Nation, and has had a strong effect 
 on its character and institutions. Without it the 
 England of to-day would have been other than it is. 
 Every Englishman, probably every one of Anglo- 
 Saxon race and speech, be his religious opinions 
 
 [1] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 what they may, owes something to its influence, 
 either in the present or the past.'' But in order to 
 understand aright the early days of the English 
 Church (the Church of the English race), we must 
 go further back to the days of an earlier Church in 
 the land conquered by the Anglo-Saxons. There 
 was a country and a people here, under the older 
 names of Britain and the British, centuries before 
 there were any English in it. ** There were great 
 men here before Agamemnon" — good and great 
 men before the coming of Augustine — a British and 
 other Keltic Churches in Great Britain and Ireland 
 long before the Jutes, the Saxons and the Angles 
 landed upon these shores. The Genesis of this 
 earliest Church, or Churches, must be taken into 
 account in considering the making of the United 
 Church of England, which was the ultimate weld- 
 ing together, by a very long and painful process, into 
 one National Church, of churches and races once 
 distinct and hostile. 
 
 The conversion of the Britons and the Scots (the 
 latter term includes the Irish) came long before, 
 and that of the Scots contributed largely to, the 
 conversion of the English. It is of that earlier 
 Christianity that I would speak in this preliminary 
 lecture, because of its agency before and after 
 Augustine 's time in the evangelization of the British 
 Isles, and because of the very large and important 
 part which it played in the conversion of the English 
 themselves. 
 
 Britain was first invaded by the Romans under 
 
 [2] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 Julius Caesar B. C. 55, but did not become a settled 
 Roman province till A. D. 84 under Domitian. 
 When the Romans took possession the Keltic people 
 whom they found dwelling here, and whom the 
 English invaders afterwards found, consisted of 
 two main divisions more or less amalgamated — viz.: 
 the Goidels and the Brythons. Both were akin to 
 the Gauls (Goidels, Gaedels, Gaels, Gauls). The 
 Goidels, who were the first comers, displaced, or 
 absorbed the earlier Iberian inhabitants. The con- 
 quering Goidels were themselves subsequently con- 
 quered by the Brythons, or Britons, and ultimately 
 driven backward into the Western parts of Britain, 
 and across the sea into Ireland. "At present the 
 languages derived from that of the Goidels are the 
 Gaelic of the Highlands, the Manx of the Isle of 
 Man, and the Erse of Ireland. The only language 
 now spoken in the British Isles which is derived 
 from that of the Britons is the Welsh" — (S. R. Gar- 
 diner). The Britons were ultimately incorporated 
 into the Roman Empire and civilization, but not so 
 the Goidels of Ireland and Scotland. There were 
 also, for long, different types of Christianity in these 
 two divisions of the Keltic race. 
 
 During the centuries that Britain continued as a 
 province of the Roman Empire Christianity had 
 become widely, if somewhat thinly and loosely, dif- 
 fused among the Britons. After the retirement of the 
 Romans early in the fifth century and the invasion by 
 the English, beginning about the middle of that cen- 
 tury, these ruthless conquerors thrust back into the 
 
 [3] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 West the surviving British Christians, and formed a 
 dark and dense mass of heathenism between the Cath- 
 olic Church on the continent of Europe and the Brit- 
 ish and Scotic Churches in the North and West. The 
 latter were confined to what is now known as Corn- 
 wall and Devon, Wales and Cumberland, Ireland 
 and Scotland. These vast regions were subsequently 
 untouched by the missionaries under Augustine and 
 his successors, who accomplished the conversion of 
 the English only in the South-East corner of Eng- 
 land. Immensely important as the Roman Mission 
 was in laying the permanent foundation of the 
 Church of the English race, we shall see how insigni- 
 ficant might have been their success, had they not 
 been so largely reenforced by the missionary enthu- 
 siasm and enterprise of the Church of the Scots. 
 Next to nothing, indeed, was done by the British 
 Church for the conversion of their hated English 
 conquerors. The times and conditions were most 
 unpropitious even had they showed any desire to 
 undertake such work, and they had no such desire. 
 But the evangelizing of the vast and dominant Eng- 
 lish Kingdom of Northumbria from the Humber to 
 the Forth, and of that other English Kingdom called 
 Mercia, covering the whole middle of the island, was 
 mainly due to the representatives of the Scotch- 
 Irish Church from its two great centres, lona and 
 Lindisfarne. 
 
 What can we learn of the origin and growth of 
 Christianity among the Britons and other Kelts? 
 
 There are no historical data for an Apostolic foun- 
 
 [4] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 dation of the Church in the British Isles. There are 
 legends of St. Paul, St. Peter, St. Philip and Joseph 
 of Arimathea preaching here ; but these are now rec- 
 ognized by all competent authorities as fictions. 
 Haddan and Stubbs, after examining every docu- 
 ment bearing on the subject, have concluded that 
 "statements respecting Apostolic men preaching in 
 Britain in the first century rest upon guess, mis- 
 take, or fable." It is, further, impossible to say 
 with certainty when, whence, or by whom the Chris- 
 tian Church in these islands was first introduced — 
 just as it is impossible to say the same of the original 
 Church in Rome. Foundations are generally out of 
 sight. Most probably, Christianity came to Britain 
 first in the person of some converted Roman soldier 
 or traveller, or of some humble trader or rich civ- 
 ilian of Gaul, the nearest neighbor on the continent 
 to the Britons and their nearest kinsfolk. We have 
 the Welsh story of Ban the Blessed, the father of 
 Caractacus the captive British king, who brought 
 back to his native land the faith learned by him in 
 his Roman prison. From the same source we have 
 the supposed indentification of the Pudens and 
 Claudia of St. Paul's 2nd Epistle to Timothy with 
 the Roman Pudens and British-born Claudia, daugh- 
 ter of Caractacus commemorated in the poet Mar- 
 tial 's verses. We have Bede 's narrative of a British 
 King named Lucius writing to Eleutherus, Bishop 
 of Rome, a letter with the Macedonian cry, **Come 
 and help us," begging that by the bishop's commis- 
 sion he might be made a Christian, and obtaining 
 
 [6] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 the fulfilment of his request — ** after which/' says 
 Bede, "the Britons retained their faith, thus re- 
 ceived inviolate and in tranquil peace until the times 
 of the Emperor Diocletian." But these stories, with 
 all their later embellishments, are dismissed as base- 
 less by the most careful historians. We have the 
 beautiful and touching Mediaeval Romance of Joseph 
 of Arimathea coming to the Isle of Avalon with 
 his twelve companions and the two holy women, 
 Mary and Martha, and bringing with them the price- 
 less treasure of the Holy Grail, — and of Joseph 
 planting his staff there which grew into the miracu- 
 lous thorn-tree that burst into blossom every Christ- 
 mas-day, of the land bestowed upon them by the 
 King Arviragus, and the simple Church of wattles 
 built thereon in honor of the Blessed Virgin — as 
 Tennyson has it: 
 
 ''That Joseph came of old to Glastonbury, 
 And there the heathen prince Arviragus 
 Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build. 
 And there he built with wattles from the marsh 
 A little lonely church in days of yore.'* 
 
 But, alas, this lovely legend vanishes, too, like 
 those of King Arthur under the prosaic touch of 
 historical criticism, and leaves us nothing but the 
 ruined Abbey at Glastonbury and its authentic and 
 not inglorious history reaching far back into the dim 
 distance of early British Christianity in the Roman 
 time. But we are getting on ground more solid 
 than the misty marshes of Avalon where we come 
 to the late Canon Bright 's "Early English Church 
 
 [6] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 History," and read his calm conclusion :— *'We can- 
 not reasonably doubt that some Christians did cross 
 the channel to our shore during the second century, 
 if not earlier, and planted here and there some set- 
 tlements of the Church. It was almost certainly 
 from Gaul," he says, ** certainly not, as far as we 
 can judge, directly from the East — that these out- 
 posts of the advancing spiritual Kingdom were sent 
 forth among the Roman provincials of Britain." 
 Irenaeus, who in 177 was Bishop of Lyons, one of 
 the earliest Christian foundations in the South of 
 Gaul, in naming all the churches of the West known 
 to his day, makes no mention of any Church in 
 Britain. But very soon after this date Christianity 
 must have taken root there (planted probably by 
 refugees from the persecution at Lyons and Vienne 
 in 177). Tertullian, about thirty years later, writing 
 of the wide spread of the Gospel in the West, says, — 
 **In all parts of Spain, among the various nations of 
 Gaul, in districts of Britain inaccessible to the 
 Romans but subdued to Christ, in all these the king- 
 dom and name of Christ are venerated." Origen, 
 about a generation later, writes to the same effect : — 
 "The power of the Saviour is felt even among those 
 who are divided from our world, in Britain." 
 **When, before the coming of Christ, did the land 
 of Britain hold the belief in the one God?" There 
 is a singular dearth of information about the Church 
 in Britain during the third century, due mainly, no 
 doubt, to the all but complete obliteration of British 
 history by the barbarity of their Saxon conquerors. 
 
 [7] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND 
 
 When we have passed into the fourth century, we have 
 the story of the martjrrdom of St. Alban, c. 304, 
 which, spite of some legendary matter mingled with 
 it in Bede's beautiful narrative, may be regarded as 
 authentic. It is interesting that this proto-martyr 
 of the British Church, Alban, the gallant soldier, 
 who gave his life gladly for his faith and for his 
 friend, is the first instance in England of a personal 
 name attached to a Christian site. Since Julius 
 Caesar captured that strong-hold of the Britons, it 
 had been known as Verulamium; but After Alban 's 
 death there it was baptized with its new name, ''St. 
 Alban 's.'' On the ''flower-clad eminence" where 
 the Christian soldier died the British Christians 
 erected a church to his memory, supplanted after- 
 wards by the stately Abbey Church which still 
 stands and is now used as an English Cathedral. 
 However obscure the origin and growth of the 
 Church in Britain, there can be no doubt that long 
 before the beginning of the fourth century, it was a 
 Church fully organized with its own bishops, pres- 
 byters and deacons, and taking its proper part in the 
 early councils of the Catholic Church. At the 
 council of Aries, 314, the records show the names of 
 three bishops from Britain — those of York, London, 
 and either Lincoln or Caerleon-on-Usk, with the 
 names of a presbyter and a deacon who attended 
 them. The records of the council of Nicea, 325, do 
 not show that British bishops were present there; 
 but the connection of Constantine with Britain and 
 his effort to make the council as general as possible, 
 
 [8] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 make it highly probable that Britain was invited. 
 Certainly the bishops of that country gave their 
 formal assent to the decrees of this important 
 council and those of Sardica in 347, whether per- 
 sonally present or not. At the Council of Rimini, or 
 Ariminum, in 359, Sulpicius Severus, a Gallic chroni- 
 cler c. 400, makes express mention of three excep- 
 tional British bishops, who were unable to pay their 
 own expenses and accepted an allowance for this 
 purpose from the Emperor. This fact may be taken, 
 I think, as a fair indication that the Church in these 
 islands was not a strong, or wealthy, or very influ- 
 ential one. This is confirmed by the dearth of mem- 
 orials, of great buildings, or literary productions, 
 or illustrious names. At Canterbury, Silchester and 
 a few other places there are some remains of 
 churches built when Britain was still a Roman prov- 
 ince. 
 
 British Christians are recognized abroad as hold- 
 ing the true Catholic Faith in the time of the tre- 
 mendous Arian struggle. They are congratulated 
 by Hilary, the famous bishop of Poitiers in 358, on 
 their "freedom from all contagion of the detestable 
 heresy. '* They were probably, under pressure from 
 the Emperor, inveigled with their fellow bishops at 
 Rimini into assenting temporarily to an uncatholie 
 formula. But they soon returned to the Nicene stand- 
 ard, for Athanasius in 363, writes of the Britons as 
 among those *' loyal to the Catholic Faith.'' Chrys- 
 ostom says, ''Even the British Isles have felt the 
 power of the word, for there, too, churches and 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 altars have been erected — there too, as in the East, 
 men may be heard disputing points in Scripture 
 with differing voices, but not with differing belief/* 
 Jerome, about 395, to the same effect declares: — 
 *' Britain worships the same Christ, observes the 
 same rule of truth" with other Christian countries. 
 He finds Britons among the pilgrims to Palestine, 
 and says that **the road to the heavenly hall stood 
 open from Britain, as well as from Jerusalem." 
 The final withdrawal of the Roman government 
 from Britain in 410, and the disturbed state of 
 Europe during the Teutonic migration left the 
 island cut off from the commerce and civilization 
 of the world, and its churchmen more isolated than 
 ever. Many of their leading members and of the 
 most promising youth of the country had followed 
 the retiring legions. Nevertheless there were not 
 wanting about this time signs of a renewed spiritual 
 life and of missionary enterprise for the conversion 
 of the Keltic peoples in the North. This appears par- 
 ticularly in the mission inaugurated by St. Ninian 
 during the last decade of the fourth century. He was 
 a native of Strathclyde in North Britain. After 
 studying in Rome and receiving Episcopal consecra- 
 tion from Pope Siricius, he returned home to become 
 a missionary bishop to his own people, and on the 
 way he seems to have been profoundly impressed by 
 a visit to the famous teacher, St. Martin of Tours. 
 **To the memory of this saint, as Bede relates, 
 Ninian built a church, not after the usual British 
 fashion of wood, but like the Romans, of white stone, 
 
 [10] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 which became renowned as the 'White House,' or 
 Whithern. Here on a promontory of Wigton Bay 
 are still the ruins of a Cathedral crowning a 
 wooded mound, representing what was once em- 
 phatically named 'the Great Monastery' and known 
 as a centre of religious light and thought for all 
 who dwelt along the Solway and between the two 
 Roman walls. So it was that in after ages St. 
 Ninian was commemorated as the instrument by 
 whom the 'Picts and Britons' had been converted to 
 the knowledge of the faith" (Bright). 
 
 With the opening of the fifth century began the 
 great Pelagian controversy in the Church about the 
 sinfulness of human nature and the necessity of 
 Divine grace to overcome it. This is not the place 
 to deal with the doctrinal questions at issue. But 
 Britain became conspicuously identified with and 
 involved in the controversy, and for the first time 
 acquired a wide reputation for heterodoxy. The 
 story of its connection with this subject makes a 
 marked epoch of its ecclesiastical history. Pelagius 
 himself was an interesting and attractive character 
 — a man of great originality and ability. St. Augus- 
 tine of Hippo, his most formidable opponent, admits 
 that in personal life he was "honorable, earnest, 
 chaste and commendable ; a holy man who had made 
 considerable progress in the Christian life, a good 
 and praiseworthy person." A good man is the most 
 powerful advocate and most dangerous propagan- 
 dist of a bad cause. Now Pelagius was, according to 
 Augustine and contemporary writers generally, a 
 
 tu] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 *' Briton." His other chief antagonist, St. Jerome, 
 with less charity and courtesy than Augustine, styles 
 him ''that big dog of Albion," and *'a huge fellow 
 stuffed to repletion with Scotch porridge" — ''Scotch" 
 meant "Irish" in those days. He is generally sup- 
 posed, however, to have been a Welshman named 
 Morgan (sea-born), the synonym of his Greek name 
 Pelagius. It is quite certain that he was a native of 
 the British Isles, but had left them before he became 
 famous and never returned thither. He was some- 
 w^hat of a rover, geographically as well as theolog- 
 ically, propagating his views in Rome and Carthage 
 and Palestine. We first hear of him prominently in 
 Rome, at which fountain-head of orthodoxy he ap- 
 pears to have picked up his pet heresy, with the as- 
 sistance of an Irishman named Coelestius and a 
 Syrian named Rufinus. His errors were powerfully 
 refuted by Sts. Augustine and Jerome, condemned 
 by numerous councils and not condemned by others. 
 He was strongly condemned by the Pope Innocent, 
 and as strongly commended for a while as a sound 
 Catholic by the succeeding Pope Zosimus — the first 
 who claimed to "inherit from St. Peter divine au- 
 thority equal to that of St. Peter." But popes were 
 not as terrible nor as infallible in those days as 
 later, and, spite of Zosimus standing sponsor for 
 Pelagius, 214 bishops in council at Carthage anathe- 
 matized his views and Pelagius was banished by the 
 Emperors, and Zosimus, the first heretical pope, was 
 scared into orthodoxy. So much for the heresiarch 
 
 [12] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 abroad. Now look at the story of Pelagianism in his 
 native land. Its chief propagator here was named 
 Agricola, son, we are told, of Severianus, a Gallican 
 bishop. Gaul had caught the contagion from Italy 
 and communicated it to her neighbor Britain. Agri- 
 cola seems to have found the British soil open to the 
 sowing of his seed, and Pelagianism grew apace 
 among his own countrjnnen. The infection spread 
 rapidly, and there was no doctor there equal to its 
 cure. The Church had just lost many of its best 
 and most influential men by the withdrawal of the 
 Romans. For lack of leaders competent to deal 
 with theological subtleties, they called in the help 
 of their better-equipped brethen in Gaul. The Gal- 
 lican Church promptly commissioned, possibly with 
 the Pope's backing, two of their notable bishops, 
 Germanus of Auxerre and Lupus of Troyes, to meet 
 the emergency. The story is told by Const ant ius, 
 the contemporary of Germanus. Arriving in Britain 
 these prelates made a grand tour of the country'- 
 about 429 A. D. They carried on a vigorous crusade 
 against the heretics, a sort of preaching mission, 
 in churches and streets and fields, wherever they 
 could best gather the clergy and the people. Their 
 mission culminated in a notable public debate with 
 the Pelagians, probably at Verulam, in which, be- 
 fore a vast audience the latter were completely 
 worsted. Then the victorious bishops made a pious 
 pilgrimage to the neighboring tomb of St. Alban, 
 depositing sacred relics at his shrine and carrying 
 
 [13] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 away some of the earth consecrated by the martyr's 
 blood. During the ensuing Lent they revived the 
 Church by their earnest preaching, and won many 
 converts, baptizing them on Easter Eve and cele- 
 brating a joyous Easter with their new converts. 
 But their sacred mission was rudely interrupted by 
 a sudden descent upon the Britons of their old ene- 
 mies the Picts and the more formidable Saxons. The 
 good bishops were equal to this emergency also, and 
 appear to have had military prowess equal to their 
 theological. By the counsel and strategy of St. Ger- 
 manus an ambush was prepared for the enemy, and, 
 when they came on confident of an easy triumph, 
 the carefully concealed Britons suddenly arose from 
 their hiding-place, and, fresh from the baptismal 
 laver of regeneration, with one mighty voice shouted 
 three times their Easter "Alleluia'* till the earth 
 rang with the thunderous sound, and their panic- 
 stricken assailants, without striking a blow, fled 
 from the field of Maes-Garmon ("German's field"). 
 This bloodless triumph became famous in Britain 
 and Gaul as the "Alleluia Victory." At a later time, 
 about 447, we are told that Germanus repeated his 
 visit to the British Church to reclaim those who had 
 relapsed into Pelagianism, bringing as his com- 
 panion this time Severus, bishop of Treves. Such 
 signal services greatly endeared him to the people, 
 and various churches and schools were dedicated 
 to him, including the Cathedral on the Isle of Man, 
 whose ruins still stand at the entrance to Peel Harbor. 
 
 [14] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 The Beginnings of the Church in Ireland, 
 
 It is time to turn our attention to the Beginnings 
 of Christianity in others parts of the British Isles. 
 If the British Church failed entirely in its duty to- 
 wards the conversion of their English conquerors, 
 they were not wanting in missionary efforts among 
 the neighboring and kindred peoples in the coun- 
 tries now known as Ireland and Scotland. It is 
 worthy of note that at the very time when the Eng- 
 lish invaders were threatening to obliterate Chris- 
 tianity in Britain itself, Patrick, a North British 
 missionary, was successfully planting it in Ireland. 
 We have already seen how Ninian had established 
 himself in Galloway, and, working his way north- 
 ward to the Grampians, had preached to the South- 
 ern Picts, *'a people that had more hair on their 
 faces than clothes on their bodies." His ''White 
 House" at Whithern became a centre of learning 
 and religious influence not only in this part of the 
 Roman province, but even reached across the sea 
 into Ireland, which had never come under the imperial 
 rule. Ireland, then called ''Scotia," was the original 
 home of the Scots, who subsequently colonized in 
 "Caledonia," or "Alban," where they became the 
 dominant people. But this new home of theirs was 
 not called "Scotland" until about the twelfth cen- 
 tury. Ninian, after his labors among the Picts, is 
 related to have emigrated to Ireland, where he was 
 known as Monen — "My Ninian." 
 
 It is very difficult, indeed, to disentangle the true 
 
 [16] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND 
 
 history of St. Patrick from the bewildering mass of 
 legends and controversies, with which it has become 
 almost hopelessly involved. 
 
 The latest scholarly life of St. Patrick, and proba- 
 bly the most impartial, based upon a critical exam- 
 ination of the original sources and the whole Patri- 
 cian literature, has recently been published (1905) 
 by G. B. Bury, professor of Modern History in the 
 University of Cambridge. The only authentic writ- 
 ings of Patrick, generally accepted, are his famous 
 ** Confession, ' ' and his ''Letter against Coroticus,*' 
 a ruler of Strathclyde in North Britain. The ''Con- 
 fession" is preserved in the most valuable "Book of 
 Armagh "^ — a beautiful manuscript of the ninth cen- 
 tury — in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, 
 along with other Patrician documents. Among 
 these are a few "Dicta," or "Sayings of Patrick," 
 the earliest "Memoirs of Patrick," by Bishop Tire- 
 chan of the Seventh Century, and the first formal 
 "Biography of Patrick," by Muirchu towards the end 
 of the Seventh Century. There are also Irish "An- 
 nals," which supply material for history back to the 
 fifth century, full of interesting legends, but of slight 
 historical value. 
 
 The so-called "Confession" of St. Patrick is a 
 sort of Apologia pro vita sua, written shortly before 
 his death. It tells us very little of his outer life, but 
 reveals the wonderful dealings of God within his 
 inmost soul. In contrast with the myriad miracles 
 recorded by his biographers, the one miracle which 
 he mentions is the Almighty Grace of God, which 
 
 [16] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 called and endowed a weak, sinful, and unlearned 
 man for the marvellous work which he accomplished. 
 His answer to all his enemies and detractors was 
 virtually the same as St. Paul's, *'I am the least of 
 the Apostles, that am not meet to be called an 
 Apostle. But by the grace of God I am what I am; 
 and His grace which was bestowed upon me was not 
 in vain; but I labored more abundantly than they 
 all ; yet not I, but the grace of God which was with 
 me.'' 
 
 Patrick was a Roman citizen of Britain, born in 
 a village named Bannaventa, which has not been 
 certainly identified. His father, Calpemius, was a 
 small land owner, and a decurion, or member of the 
 Roman town-council, and also a Christian Deacon, as 
 his father Potitus had been a Christian Presbyter. 
 The British name of the future Apostle of Ireland 
 was Sucat ; but, like his father and grand-father, he 
 was best known by his Roman name — Patricius. He 
 was probably born about 389, and brought up as a 
 Christian; but he speaks of himself as "most rustic 
 and unlearned," and bitterly laments some serious 
 sin of his youth. He had reached the age of sixteen 
 when a fleet of Irish freebooters landed in his native 
 town, and Patrick and his sister were among the 
 captives carried away to what he calls 'Hhe ulti- 
 mate places of the earth," so far off did barbar- 
 ous Ireland seem to a Roman citizen of Britain. Ac- 
 cording to his own story, he became the unhappy 
 slave of a hard master who dwelt near the wood of 
 Fochlad "nigh to the Western Sea" — a wild and 
 
 [17] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 desolate region in North-Western Connaught — who 
 ''sent him into the fields to feed swine." Here, like 
 the Prodigal Son, "he came to himself," and came 
 to God. He describes fully this conversion, which 
 profoundly affected his whole subsequent career. 
 He tells us also of the visions and voices which prom- 
 ised him deliverance from his servitude. In obedi- 
 ence thereto he made his escape, and, after many 
 perils over land, reached the nearest port (probably 
 Wicklow), and found **the ship of his dreams." He 
 was reluctantly allowed by the rough heathen crew 
 to work his passage to an unknown port, which they 
 reached in three days. Then, for two months of 
 dreadful hardship, he toiled through a dreary wild- 
 erness until he made his escape from his new mas- 
 ters. ** Though Patrick does not mention the scene 
 of his journey in the narrative which he left behind 
 him, he used to tell his disciples how he had "the 
 fear of God in his journey through Gaul to Italy" 
 ("Dicta"). It was in Italy, then, we must suppose, 
 that he succeeded in escaping from them" (Bury). I 
 can only give a brief summary of Bury's main con- 
 clusions as to the subsequent career of Patrick prior 
 to his mission to Ireland, based upon a critical exam- 
 ination of the oldest sources. The first episode of 
 his escape in Italy was his sojourn for some years 
 in the famous Island-Monastery of the Mediterra- 
 nean, Lerinus (or Lerins) founded by Honoratus in 
 the fourth century, one of the most influential seats 
 of religion and learning in Southern Gaul. Lerins 
 became associated with some of the most illustrious 
 
 [18] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 leaders of Western Christendom. Here, then, we 
 may suppose, was Patrick's first initiation into mon- 
 astic life at its best. But his real mission was not 
 made known to him, until he left Lerins to visit his 
 kinsfolk in Britain. His surviving relatives, he tells 
 us, received him "as a son," and they implored him 
 Qot to leave them again. But Patrick was soon to 
 learn here in his old home that the work of his life 
 lay far hence among the heathen. In a vision of 
 the night, as he describes it in his "Confession," 
 there stood before him a man named Victoricus — 
 like St. Paul's Man of Macedonia — fresh from Ire- 
 land with a bundle of letters in his hand, "And he 
 gave me one of these, and I read the beginning of 
 the letter, which contained the 'Voice of the Irish.' 
 And, as I read the beginning of it, I fancied that I 
 heard the voice of the folk who were near the wood 
 of Fochlad, nigh to the Western Sea. And this was 
 the cry: 'We pray thee, holy youth, to come again 
 and walk among us as before.' I was pierced to the 
 heart and could read no more, and thereupon I 
 awoke." St. Patrick was not disobedient to the 
 heavenly vision. But, in spite of his fiery zeal for 
 God, he was not a fanatic who rushed rashly into 
 so great a work without proper preparation, and 
 without the backing and commission of influential 
 authorities in the Church. The evidence shows that 
 he shortly retired to Gaul, and was located in Aux- 
 erre, a city which seems to have had very close rela- 
 tions with the British Church. Its bishop, then, was 
 a famous man, Amator, by whom Patrick was or- 
 
 [IB] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 dained Deacon. As some fourteen years seem to 
 have passed before he set out for Ireland, he 
 must have encountered serious impediments and 
 even opposition. Meanwhile Germanus had suc- 
 ceeded Amator as Bishop of Auxerre, had visited 
 Britain and rendered signal service by putting down 
 Pelagianism and strengthening the British Chris- 
 tians. This work of Germanus had the direct sanc- 
 tion of Celestine, Bishop of Rome. We are told that 
 there was another deacon, more eminent at this time 
 than Patrick, associated with Germanus. His name 
 was Palladius, and he seems to have been instru- 
 mental in inducing Pope Celestine to send Germanus 
 on his special mission to Britain. Now there is good 
 authority for the statement that this same Palladius 
 was the first bishop sent to organize the Christians 
 already in Ireland. Prosper of Aquitaine, who was 
 a contemporary writer and intimately associated 
 with Rome, relates in his ''Chronicle" that ''Pope 
 Celestine sent Palladius to the Scots (i. e., Irish) 
 believing in Christ." This was in the year 431. 
 Bede says the same. But this mission of Palladius 
 to Ireland seems to have come to an end within a 
 year by his death, and the best opinion is that in 
 the year 432 Patrick took his place, being consecrated 
 as bishop by Germanus, probably with the Pope's 
 approval. And so at last, through much tribulation 
 and disappointment and opposition, "the man and 
 the hour arrived." The long desire of Patrick was 
 realized, and he became the real Apostle of the 
 Irish. The tradition is that Patrick had already set 
 
 [20] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 out from Auxerre to work under Palladius, when 
 the news reached Gaul that the bishop, Palladius, 
 was dead. Patrick seems to have landed, like Palla- 
 dius, at Wicklow, and to have worked his way 
 northward towards the land of his former captivity. 
 His work in Ireland probably lasted for about 
 thirty years, and covered a great part of the 
 island, but particularly the North. The actual 
 details of his travels and toils have been well-nigh 
 overwhelmed by the luxuriant imagination of his 
 later biographers. But the main features of his 
 labors and success have been rescued by sober his- 
 torical criticism, and show that this first great mis- 
 sionary of the British race and true Apostle of Ire- 
 land was indeed a very remarkable man. I shall 
 not atempt to go into the details of his abundant 
 labors. 
 
 Among the long and bitter controversies concern- 
 ing Patrick's career, no small part of it has to do 
 with his relation to the Roman See. Much more im- 
 portance has attached to this question than it deserves. 
 But I will give Bury's calm conclusion. He finds 
 evidence for one visit of Patrick to Rome about the 
 year 441 in two ancient records, — one in the 
 '' Annals," — the other in Tirechan's ''Life of the 
 Saint." The statement in the ''Annals" is: "Leo is 
 ordained Bishop of the Roman Church; Bishop Pat- 
 rick is approved in the Catholic Faith." "Such ap- 
 proval," he says, "might have come in the shape 
 of a formal epistle from the Roman bishop to the 
 bishop of Ireland. But, when we find in our seventh 
 
 [21] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 century authority, Tirechan, a statement that ** Pat- 
 rick was in Rome accompanied by Sachellus,*' and 
 when we find that in his time there were relics of 
 Peter and Paul and other martyrs procured by 
 Saint Patrick, we may venture to combine these 
 testimonies, and conclude that Patrick did visit 
 Rome in the beginning of Leo's Pontificate." "Pat- 
 rick," he continues, *'had been eight years in Ire- 
 land when a greater than Celestine or Xystus was 
 elected to the See of Rome. The Pontificate of Leo 
 the Great marks an eminent station in the progress 
 of the Roman bishops to that commanding position 
 which they were ultimately to occupy in Eur- 
 ope. ... It was in the year after his elevation that 
 Patrick, according to the conclusion to which our 
 evidence points, betook himself to Rome. No step 
 could have been more natural, and none could have 
 been more politic. ... To report the success of his 
 labors to the head of the western churches, of which 
 Ireland was the youngest, to enlist his personal sym- 
 pathy, to gain his formal approbation, his moral 
 support and his advice, were objects which would 
 well repay a visit to Rome, and an absence of some 
 length from Ireland. . . . But it is possible that he 
 may have had a more particular motive, which may 
 explain why he chose just this time for his visit. 
 Hitherto, active in different parts of the island, he 
 had established no central seat, no primatial or met- 
 ropolitan church for the chief bishop. Not long 
 after his return, he founded the Church of Armagh, 
 fixing his own See there, and establishing it as the 
 
 [22] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 primatial church. This was a step of the highest 
 importance in the progress of ecclesiastical organiz- 
 ation, and it is not a very daring conjecture to sup- 
 pose that Patrick may have wished to consult the 
 Roman bishop concerning this design and obtain 
 his approbation. . . . He may well have received 
 practical advice from Leo — such advice as a later 
 pontiff gave to Augustine for the conversion of the 
 English." 
 
 As St. Patrick's end drew near, he seems to have 
 retired from his Metropolitan See at Armagh, ap- 
 pointing his disciple Benignus as his successor there, 
 and to have returned to the scene of his earliest 
 labors beside Strangford Lough. Here he died at 
 Saul near Downpatrick, and here, at the site of the 
 present Cathedral, he was buried in the year of our 
 Lord 461. ''Judged by what he actually accom- 
 plished," it has been said, ''he must be placed among 
 the most efficient of those who took part in spread- 
 ing the Christian faith beyond the boundaries of the 
 Roman Empire. He was endowed in abundant mea- 
 sure with the quality of enthusiasm, and stands in 
 quite a different rank from the Apostle of England, 
 in whom this victorious energy of enthusiasm was 
 lacking, Augustine, the messenger and instrument 
 of Gregary the Great. Patrick was no more messen- 
 ger or instrument. He had a strong personality and 
 the power of initiative; he depended on himself, or, 
 as he would have said on Divine guidance." 
 
 Among the many treasures of the wonderful 
 "Book of Armagh" is an Irish Hymn (the oldest 
 
 [23] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 monument of the Irish-Keltic language) called *'S. 
 Patricii Canticum Scotticum," which Patrick is 
 said to have composed when he went to convert the 
 chief king of the island, Laoghaire at Tara. This 
 Hymn was current before the ninth century as 
 Patrick's, and may have been composed by him. It 
 is generally known as the **Lorica of S. Patrick" — 
 in Irish *'Faeth Fiada," or the '* Deer's Cry." 
 
 I can hardly close this sketch of the Irish saint 
 better than by quoting the closing part of the Hymn 
 in the verse translation of the Irish poet, Clarence 
 Mangan, ''which preserves in a wonderful manner 
 the time and spirit of the original" (Dr. Todd). 
 
 ' ' May Christ, I pray, 
 Protect me to-day 
 Against poison and fire. 
 Against drowning and wounding, 
 That so, in His grace abounding, 
 I may earn the preacher's hire. 
 
 Christ, as a Light, 
 
 Illumine and guide me! 
 
 Christ, as a shield, o 'ershadow and cover me ! 
 
 Christ be under me! Christ be over me! 
 
 Christ be beside me 
 
 On left hand and right! 
 Christ be before me, behind me, about me! 
 Christ this day be within and without me! 
 
 Christ the lowly and meek, 
 
 Christ the all-powerful, be 
 
 In the heart of each to whom I speak. 
 
 In the mouth of each who speaks to me ! 
 
 In all who draw near me, 
 
 Or see or hear me. 
 
 [24] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 At Tara today, in this awful hour, 
 
 I call on the Holy Trinity! 
 Glory to Him Who reigneth in power, 
 The God of the Elements, Father and Son, 
 And Paraclete-Spirit, which Three are the One. 
 
 The Everlasting Divinity! 
 
 Salvation dwells with the Lord, 
 
 "With Christ, the Omnipotent Word, 
 
 From generation to generation, 
 
 Grant us, Lord, Thy grace and salvation." 
 
 There can be no doubt of the truth of the state- 
 ment that '^Patrick's achievements as organizer of a 
 Church and as propagator of his faith made Christian- 
 ity a living force in Ireland which could never be 
 extinguished." After his death, probably in the 
 year 461, we find a vast number of churches and 
 monasteries which made Ireland famous in the next 
 century as ''the Island of Saints" and ''the Mother 
 of a race of missionaries." His system, like that of 
 Gaul where he learned it, centred in its wonderful 
 monasteries, which fairly girdled the land like out- 
 posts and camps of a Christian army in an enemy's 
 country. But there were some marked peculiarities 
 about the later development of this system on eccen- 
 tric lines which Patrick would hardly have ap- 
 proved. The later Irish Church had no Diocesan 
 Episcopacy at all, as Patrick seems to have estab- 
 lished, and as we find in Britain and everywhere 
 else. There were many bishops, however, too many 
 indeed. But these, while conferring Holy Orders 
 and discharging the offices peculiar to the Episco- 
 
 [25] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 pate, were no longer the heads and rulers of the 
 ecclesiastical centres. They were subject to the 
 Abbot, generally a Presbyter, who presided over and 
 ruled the monasteries. Nor need we wonder at this 
 unique method of government which came to char- 
 acterize the Church of the Scots, first in Ireland and 
 subsequently in Scotland, when we remember that 
 these countries were mostly Christianized at the 
 very time when they were almost cut off from Rome 
 and Western Christendom generally — when Britain 
 herself was gradually overwhelmed by the invasion 
 of the heathen English. This ecclesiastical isolation 
 goes far to explain the notable differences of usage 
 which characterized the Scotch-Irish missionaries 
 when they afterwards came into contact and colli- 
 sion with those from Rome. The Scotic system, how- 
 ever, if rude and irregular, was not ill-suited to their 
 tribal organization and to the social and religious 
 needs of the time and the people. 
 
 After the death of the great Apostle of the Irish, 
 religion naturally declined for a while, but seems 
 to have regained much of its pristine power by 
 coming into closer connection with the surviving 
 British churchmen in Wales, receiving thence its 
 Liturgy, and renewing its life under the leadership 
 of the Welsh teachers, David, Gildas and Cadoc. 
 From them and their famous schools came what is 
 called ''the Second Order of Irish Saints," and the 
 founders of similar and even greater schools in Ire- 
 land. It was these later Irish saints and scholars 
 who sent forth that wonderful succession of mission- 
 
 [26] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 ary leaders, who carried their fiery zeal to Gaul, to 
 Germany, to Switzerland, to Italy, and even to the 
 far-off Faroe Islands and Iceland. It was these men 
 that kept Christianity alive and aggressive in the 
 North and Northwest when the irruption of the 
 Teutonic barbarians southward overwhelmed for a 
 while the civilized world. From these came St. Col- 
 umban the Apostle of Burgundy, St. Gall, his pupil 
 the Apostle of Switzerland, Fridoline the Apostle of 
 Swabia and Alsace, Truidpert of the Black Forest, 
 Killian of Franconia, and St. Columba the Apostle of 
 Scotland, whose successors not only converted Scot- 
 land, but shared so largely with the followers of St. 
 Augustine, the Roman, in the conversion of England 
 and the English. 
 
 The Beginnings of the Church in Scotland. 
 
 Let us now cross over again from Ireland to Scot- 
 land, and witness the beginning and advance of 
 Christianity in that country. The work of its first 
 evangelist, St. Ninian, was followed up by St. Kenti- 
 gem, called also St. Mungo, known as the Apostle of 
 Strathclyde. He was consecrated to the Episcopate 
 by an Irish bishop about 550, and established his 
 humble See at Cathures, now Glasgow, becoming 
 thereby the founder of the future cathedral and city. 
 After a considerable period of pioneer work in this 
 region, Kentigern retired for a while to Wales and 
 became the head of a vast monastery on the river 
 Blwy, where he was succeeded by his pupil St. 
 
 [27] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 Asaph, the founder of the future Welsh Cathedral 
 of that name. Returning to Strathclyde about the 
 year 573 with a band of his pupils, Kentigern re- 
 sumed his labors with increased zeal and success 
 until his aged body was laid to rest beside the altar 
 of his rude cathedral, which perpetuates his memory 
 so dear to the Scots. Thus an entering wedge 
 into the land of the pagan Picts had opened the way 
 for the far more auspicious mission of Scotland's 
 great apostle, St. Columba. 
 
 We are more fortunate in having the materials for 
 an authentic life of Columba than in the cases of 
 Patrick, Ninian and Kentigern. These are found 
 mainly in the **Life of Columba," by Adamnan, 
 which its learned editor, the late Bishop Reeves of 
 Down, calls **an inestimable literary relic of the 
 Irish Church — the most valuable of that institution 
 which has escaped the ravages of time." This 
 Adamnan was the ninth Abbot of the Monastery of 
 lona in a rapid succession from Columba (679-704). 
 He was bom within a generation of the saint's 
 death, and wrote his Memoir within a century of 
 that event. He wrote at lona the fountain-head, 
 where he spent many years, and had the opportunity 
 of conversing with those who had known Columba 
 personally. Adamnan had access to all the mater- 
 ials, oral and written, which the island could fur- 
 nish. I may add that we are fortunate also in having 
 two such recent explorers of this field as the late Irish 
 bishop of Down, Dr. Reeves, and the French Count 
 de Montalembert in his ''Monks of the West." For 
 
 [28] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 popular sketches of St. Columba, the late Professor 
 Stokes's, ''Ireland and the Keltic Church," and the 
 late Bishop Dowden's, *'The Keltic Church in Scot- 
 land," leave little to be desired. I have drawn from 
 all of these. 
 
 Columba, unlike Patrick, was an Irishman by race 
 and birth and education. He was bom at Gartan in 
 Donegal, December 7th, 521, and was of the famous 
 clan of the O'Donnells. He was of the bluest Irish 
 blood on both sides of the house, being the great- 
 great-grandson of Niall, the High King of Ireland. 
 He was probably baptized with two names of oppos- 
 ite significance — Crinthann, a "wolf," and Columba, 
 a ''dove." The former name was fitly dropped 
 when he dropped his war-like, and perhaps, wolf- 
 like, feats in Ireland to become the devoted Christian 
 Evangelist of Scotland. For his education, he seems 
 to have first attended a monastic school of Bishop 
 Finnian of Moville, who had himself been a pupil in 
 the North British school founded by Ninian at Whit- 
 hern. Here he was ordained Deacon. We next hear of 
 him as associated with a mere secular sort of teacher, 
 Gemman, who was a "Bard," one of the num- 
 erous professional poets and national chroniclers of 
 Erin. Three Latin Hymns, and several Irish poems 
 have been preserved, which are attributed to Col- 
 umba with better reason than the Hymns ascribed 
 to Patrick. But more important than either of 
 these earlier teachers in the education of Columba 
 was the illustrious monastic school of Clonard, 
 founded by another Finnian in the beginning of the 
 
 [29] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 sixth century, who had studied in the South British 
 school at Menevia in Wales under St. David. Clon- 
 ard is said to have had as many as 3,000 students 
 at once. ''From the school of Clonard," says Arch- 
 bishop Usher, "scholars of old came out in as great 
 numbers as Greek's from the side of the horse at 
 Troy." Here, then, in this notable seat of learning, 
 Columba was a pupil for some years, and during 
 this time he was ordained Priest. There is a curious 
 old story that Finnian, who was only a presbyter 
 himself, wanted a resident bishop in his monastery, 
 selected Columba and sent him to a neighboring 
 bishop named Etchen, who was found ploughing in 
 the field, and that this agricultural prelate, whose 
 mind then was mostly on his plough, by mistake or- 
 dained him only presbyter. Certainly Columba re- 
 mained only a presbyter for life, even after he 
 became head of the monastery at lona. In this 
 respect he was followed by his successors there, and 
 in the numerous daughter-monasteries subject there- 
 to, it being regarded "as unbecoming that any of his 
 successors should profess a higher dignity than their 
 great patron." Columba, who, like the later School- 
 men, seems to have gone the round of the chief seats 
 of learning accessible, is also related to have studied 
 in the monastery of Glasnevin, now a beautiful sub- 
 urb of Dublin. Bishop Reeves thinks that his life 
 as a student was followed by no less than fifteen 
 years of missionary labor in Ireland, founding num- 
 erous churches and monasteries in many parts oS 
 
 [SO] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 the country — notably at Kells, Derry and Durrow, 
 his favorite foundations. 
 
 Thus passed the first forty years — more than half 
 of his life in his native land. Various reasons have 
 been suggested for the sudden and wonderful change 
 in Columba's character and career, which shifted 
 the scene of his exploits from Ireland to Scotland. 
 Whether true or not, we can hardly pass over the 
 traditional story of the occasion which brought him 
 to his new home, where he was to spend about 
 thirty-five years of most heroic service for God 
 and man. Columba had acquired to a remarkable 
 degree, we are told, the Monk's favorite art of copy- 
 ing and beautifully illuminating rare manuscripts. 
 The story is that, while visiting his early teacher, Fin- 
 nian of Moville, he borrowed and secretly copied a 
 precious Latin Psalter of his friend, and, when Fin- 
 nian discovered this, he was very angry and claimed 
 the copy. Columba was Irishman enough to refuse 
 to surrender without a fight. An appeal was made 
 to the King of Meath, who decided against the copy- 
 ist, quoting the Keltic law, *'To every cow belongs 
 her calf,'* therefore 'Ho every book belongs its 
 copy, or child-book." At this decision Columba 's 
 Keltic blood was up, and he must fight it out to a 
 finish. He did not justify as yet the name of 
 **Dove," by showing a very dove-like disposition. 
 ''The Call of the Wild" had aroused the "Wolf- 
 that was still in him. Like a hot-headed 'Donnell, 
 he stirred up his own Northern clansmen, and a 
 bloody battle between the two factions resulted in 
 
 [31] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 victory for Columba and the slaughter of many of 
 his enemies. A synod of the Irish Church excom- 
 municated him as a man of blood. His confessor, or 
 ** soul-friend," as he called him, counselled submis- 
 sion and repentance. Impelled by remorse for his 
 unworthy conduct, and a desire to atone for it by 
 amendment of life, he resolved to begin his ministry 
 afresh in foreign parts. With twelve chosen com- 
 panions, Columba bade farewell to his beloved Erin, 
 and, embarking in an open boat, the exile kept on 
 his course until he was out of sight of Ireland, and 
 landed, on the memorable evening of Whit-Monday, 
 563, at the island called Hii, now known as lona. 
 
 Apart from this characteristic story of the times 
 and the people, there seem to have been weighty 
 and worthy reasons why this typical Irishman of 
 his day should have sought a missionary field in 
 "Alban," now known as *' Scotland." For some 
 years past there had been going on an emigration of 
 his countrymen from the older Scotia — from the 
 North coast of Ireland to the West coast of a new 
 Scotland. Here the emigrants from Antrim, called 
 then "Dalriada," had founded a new home called 
 Dalriada also, after the old. It was this colony of 
 nominally Christian people whose King Conal at the 
 time of Columba 's coming was his kinsman, and who 
 probably gave him the island of lona. There was 
 also a special reason at this time why the ardent 
 Irishman should come to the aid of his kinsfolk 
 across the water. They were just now in imminent 
 danger of extinction from their ferocious pagan 
 
 [S2] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 neighbors, the Picts, who under their ''most power- 
 ful king," Brude, had recently defeated them in 
 battle. Such then were the historical conditions — 
 political and religious — when ''the man and the 
 hour arrived" — when the first great missionary of 
 the Irish race became the noble Apostle of Scotland 
 —the helper of his Christian kinsmen in their feeble 
 colony here, and the converter of their enemies, the 
 heathen Picts. lona, at the coming of Columba, was 
 a forlorn and insignificant island, about three miles 
 long and one wide, off the coast of the large island 
 of Mull on the west coast of Scotland. Here for 
 two years he was fully occupied with establishing a 
 secure and self-supporting settlement — building rude 
 houses of wattle and clay and of oak-boards, a 
 church, a refectory, cells for the monks and their 
 Abbot, and a hospitium for their guests. They had 
 to bring the ground, also, under cultivation for their 
 food — ploughing, sowing, reaping, gathering the 
 grain into their barns, grinding it in their mills, 
 turning it into bread in their ovens. They had to 
 gather some live stock, too, sheep and cattle and 
 cows. Fortunately, there were fish enough at hand 
 for feasts as well as fasts. All the while the daily 
 round of monastic worship and study and discipline 
 must be maintained. This was no place for idle 
 meditation, or self-indulgent dreams. Worship and 
 work went ever hand in hand. Columba was not 
 only fitting his monks for missionaries of the Gospel, 
 but he would give his neighbors here a picture and 
 a model of a genuine Christian community, indus- 
 
 [33] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 trial, social, educational, as well as ecclesiastical — 
 with a daily round of work, manual, intellectual, 
 and spiritual. During this time of settlement and 
 organization the colony had grown into some two 
 hundred persons. And then their sagacious leader 
 was ready for the next step, and for a forward 
 movement. He would transform this Christian 
 brotherhood into a centre of constant effort, and 
 turn his monks into marching missionary regiments 
 for bold and well-planned attacks upon the strong- 
 holds of the heathen. Already they had made many 
 converts among the peasants of Mull and the main 
 land. But now the courageous Kelt would follow 
 the example of Patrick in Ireland, and reach out 
 for Royalty, for the Pictish King Brude, who could 
 carry his people with him when converted to Christ. 
 Attended by two Pictish converts and interpreters 
 and by picked men of his monks, Columba set forth 
 upon his first great missionary campaign, following 
 the series of Loughs which now constitute the Cale- 
 donian Canal and divide Scotland into two parts. 
 Lq this audacious expedition he penetrated to the 
 very citadel of pagan power as far as Inverness on 
 the east coast, to bid Brude the hostile King of the 
 Picts, open his bolted gates and stubborn heart to 
 the entrance of the Gospel of peace. By gaining 
 such a convert, what an atonement for his part in 
 the bloody feud of the Irish clans was Columba 's 
 successful work of healing the feud between the 
 Christian Scot and the Pagan Pict ! How much no- 
 bler his warfare for Christ in Scotland than that 
 
 [84] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 which he had waged in his native land ! Beginning 
 with his triumph over the heathen magic of Broi- 
 chan, the Druid chieftain, and the baptism of King 
 Brude, Columba carried on in person for ten years 
 his work of converting the Highland hea(then; and 
 then, leaving his disciples to follow it up, he with- 
 drew to his Island-Monastery to make it the mighti- 
 est agency for Christ in the British Isles. Under 
 his own able administration and that of his well- 
 trained successors, lona's evangelizing influence 
 spread all over Scotland; and then, a generation 
 after Columba 's death, joined forces with Augus- 
 tine's Roman monks in the conversion of the Noth- 
 umbrian English. For thirty-four years Columba 
 carried on in person his wondrous work, and of his 
 mission as a peace-maker, the late Principal Story 
 of Glasgow University, says: ''The missions of Col- 
 umba laid the first foundation of inter-tribal peace 
 throughout Northern Britain, and so paved the way 
 for the consolidation of the Picts, Scots, Britons and 
 Saxons into one nation. It is not an exaggeration 
 to say that not only the Scottish Church but the 
 Scottish state recognizes its founder in Columba." 
 
 Indeed the Kingdom of Scotland properly began 
 with that first colony of Irish in their new home of 
 Dalriada, now Argyll, whose King was Conal at the 
 coming of Columba. It was to aid these fellow- 
 countrymen, partly at least, that Columba had 
 settled at lona, nor did he ever cease to befriend 
 them during all his other labors. He secured them 
 from the hostile attacks of King Brude and the 
 
 [35] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 Picts. He took an active part, too, in their internal 
 government. When one of their kings died, and 
 the legitimate successor was incompetent, the saint 
 took the bold step of consecrating a better man 
 named Aidan to the throne. It is interesting to 
 remember the tradition that he was consecrated 
 upon the ''Stone of Fate," used for long in the 
 consecration of Scottish kings, later removed to 
 Scone and afterwards to Westminster Abbey, whero 
 it still survives in the coronation chair of English 
 kings. 
 
 Another notable case in which Columba came to 
 the help of his fellow-countrymen of Dalriada, was 
 when he accompanied their King in 575 to a great 
 Synod of the Irish chieftains at Drumceatt in Ire- 
 land, and "gained Home Rule for Scottish Dal- 
 riada," by procuring for them exemption from the 
 payment of a burdensome tribute to the High King 
 of Ireland at Tara. It is gratifying to know that 
 this was not the only occasion in which the exiled 
 Columba visited his native land. He frequently ex- 
 changed visits with his former colleagues there, and 
 was greatly beloved both by them and by the Irish 
 people generally. His old monasteries there and 
 numerous offshoots were glad to remain subject to 
 the far-famed Abbot of lona. At length, having 
 rounded out a serene old age, early Sunday morn- 
 ing, June 9th, 597, — the same year that St. Augus- 
 tine began his mission in England, — St. Columba 
 closed his eventful career in Scotland — ''the noblest 
 missionary career," says Bright, "ever accom- 
 
 [36] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 plished in Britain.*' A week before his death the 
 first royal convert to Christ of the English race, 
 Ethelbert, King of Kent, was baptized at Canter- 
 bury. Among the closing scenes of St. Columba's 
 last day on earth are these touching stories drawn 
 from Adamnan's narrative by Prof. Stokes: — **He 
 visited his monks at their labors in the field, and 
 blessed them. He visited the granary, and saw that 
 the provisions were sufiicient till the next harvest. 
 Here Adamnan tells one of the most touching 
 stories, illustrating Columba's keen poetic sym- 
 pathy with nature and with animals (worthy of St. 
 Francis). Half-way between the granary and the 
 storehouse is a spot still marked by one of the an- 
 cient crosses of lona called Maclean's Cross. There 
 Columba met the white horse which had been em- 
 ployed to carry milk from the dairy to the monas- 
 tery. The horse came and put his head on his 
 master's shoulder, as if to take leave of him. The 
 eyes of the faithful animal seemed bathed with 
 tears. His attendant would have sent the horse 
 away, but Columba forbade him. 'The horse loves 
 me,' he said, 'leave him with me; let him weep for 
 my departure. The Creator has revealed to this 
 poor beast what He has hidden from thee a reason- 
 able man.' Upon which, caressing the faithful brute, 
 he gave him a last blessing. 
 
 After this he went to his cell, and worked at the 
 transcription of a Psalter. When he came to Psalm 
 XXXIV. 10, ' Inquirentes autem Dominum non 
 deficient omni hono^ — they that seek the Lord shall 
 
 [37] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 want no manner of thing that is good — *I must stop 
 here,* he said. 'Baithene will finish the rest/ 
 (Baithene was his kinsman and successor.) He 
 then sent a last message to his followers enjoining 
 peace and charity. It was now Saturday night, 
 June 8th, 597. As soon as the midnight bell rang 
 for the Matins of Sunday, he rose from his stone 
 couch, ran to the church before the other monks, and 
 there was found by his attendant prostrate before 
 the altar. Columba opened his eyes once, turned 
 them upon his brethen with a look full of serene and 
 radiant joy, raised his right hand in an effort to 
 bless them, and so passed away with a face calm and 
 sweet, like that of a man who in his sleep has seen 
 a vision of heaven.'' 
 
 And so the dove-like spirit of St. Columba took 
 its flight to God. Of his dear lona its founder said 
 the day before his death, as he lifted up his hands 
 and blessed the monastic buildings, ''To this place, 
 little and poor tho' it be, there shall come great 
 honor, not only from Scottish kings and people, but 
 from barbarous and foreign nations, and from the 
 saints of other churches also." Standing on that 
 illustrious island. Dr. Samuel Johnson declares, 
 **that man is little to be envied whose patriotism 
 would not be enforced upon the Plain of Marathon, 
 or whose piety would not grow warmer among the 
 ruins of lona.'' As our own American Church poet 
 Rev. William Croswell has it, 
 
 "The pilgrim at lona 's shrine 
 Forgets his journey's toil, 
 
 As faith rekindles in his breast 
 On that inspiring soil." 
 [38] 
 
BEGINNINGS OF KELTIC CHURCHES 
 
 We will conclude this lecture with a parting 
 glimpse at the Old British Church proper, with which 
 we began. During the period of more than a cen- 
 tury and a half, from the begining of Patrick's 
 career in Ireland to the close of Columba's in Scot- 
 land, which was also contemporaneous with the be- 
 ginning of Augustine's in what had become Eng- 
 land — while the conversion of the Irish and the 
 Scotch had been going on apace, the Anglo-Saxon 
 tribes had gradually overrun the greater part of old 
 Britain, and well-nigh wiped out British Christ- 
 ianity from the regions which the conquerors occu- 
 pied. While the light of the Gospel was spreading 
 steadily among the two Scottish peoples, a thick 
 darkness of heathenism was settling down upon the 
 British Church. The worship of Woden and Thor 
 and other Teutonic gods was supplanting the relig- 
 ion of Christ in England. The population, the laws, 
 the language, and the very names of the days of the 
 week were changed. The churches and monasteries, 
 the homes and the cities of the Christians were ruth- 
 lessly destroyed. Some fled over sea to Gaul and 
 settled down in Armorica, to which they gave the 
 name of Brittany. The rest who survived the 
 Saxon slaughter took refuge chiefly in the moun- 
 tains of Wales and the fastnesses of Cornwall and 
 Devon. Gildas, the only contemporary British his- 
 torian of the latter part of this period, writing about 
 the middle of the sixth century, gives a frightful 
 picture of the devastation wrought by the invaders, 
 crying, with the captive psalmist, "0 God, the 
 
 [30] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 heathen have come into Thine inheritance ; Thy holy 
 temple have they defiled." But the worst part of 
 his story is his woeful description of the moral and 
 religious corruption in the small remnant of the 
 British Church itself. His picture indeed, in all its 
 dreadful details, is so appalling as to compel careful 
 historians to conclude that it is overdrawn. For 
 there are not wanting evidences of a continuous spir- 
 itual and ecclesiastical life in the Welsh Church. 
 In 410, when the final withdrawal of the Romans 
 occurred, we find only one Episcopal See in Wales, 
 Caerleon-on-Usk. But later, after the influx of the 
 refugees from other parts of Britain, we find as 
 many as six Sees. By a subsequent union of several 
 Sees before the coming of Augustine this number 
 had been reduced to four — the same four which sur- 
 vive to-day, Llandaff, St. David's, St. Asaph's, and 
 Bangor. These are still the survivals of the old 
 British Church, the continuous lineal descendants 
 of the earliest Bishoprics in Britain, with an un- 
 broken historical succession and life. For centuries 
 after Augustine they were independent both of 
 Rome and of Canterbury, and they did not lose 
 their identity when they were finally, but very 
 gradually, after the Norman Conquest, engrafted 
 into and absorbed by the English Church. 
 
 [40] 
 
II 
 
 The Coming of Augustine and the Roman Mission 
 TO THE English 
 
 Having taken a preliminary glimpse of the land 
 and of the peoples and the churches which had 
 occupied Great Britain and Ireland before the settle- 
 ment of the Anglo-Saxons here, and between the 
 time of their coming and the coming of St. Augus- 
 tine's mission to them, — we take up now the often 
 told story of the conversion of the heathen English 
 to Christianity and the founding of the First Church 
 of the English race. 
 
 Near the end of the sixth century — in the year 
 that St. Columba died — another saint and hero, from 
 a more potent seat than Patrick's Primatial See of 
 Armagh or Columba 's lonely lona, began to play a 
 prominent part in the re-conquest of Britain from 
 pagan idolatry. The best part of Britain had now 
 become " Engle-land, " the home of the Teutonic 
 tribes who had settled down here with their families 
 to stay, and who, after a century and a half of con- 
 quest, formed a group of petty kingdoms commonly 
 called "The Saxon Heptarchy." The work of con- 
 verting these savages to Christ was a formidable task, 
 but the work was well begun at least by the foremost 
 man of Western Christendom, Gregory the Great, 
 Bishop of Rome — as great in personal character as 
 
 [41] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 in official position. He was a man of noble birth and of 
 great wealth, who, after holding the highest civil office 
 then in Rome, that of imperial Prefect, had early- 
 renounced the world by becoming a monk and de- 
 voting himself and his wealth to the cause of God 
 and of humanity. After founding six monasteries in 
 Sicily, he established a seventh on the Coclian hill 
 in Rome. Here he gradually rose from the hum- 
 blest place therein to be its abbot. For about six 
 years he was an Envoy of the Roman See to the capi- 
 tal of the Empire at Constantinople. By his self- 
 sacrificing services to his native city in times of direst 
 adversity, when there were flood and famines and 
 pestilence within the walls and the Lombards raging 
 and ravaging without, Gregory had really become the 
 ' * Father of his country ' ' before he became the Father 
 of the English Church. ''The Monastery of St. An- 
 drew's on Mt. Coelius founded by Gregory," says the 
 Count de Montalembert, **is the one which now bears 
 the name of St. Gregory, and is known to all who 
 have visited Rome. This incomparable city contains 
 few spots more attractive and more worthy of eternal 
 remembrances. ... On the fagade of the Church an in- 
 scription records that thence set out the first Apostles 
 of the Anglo-Saxons, and preserves their names." 
 
 The situation in England at this time was pecu- 
 liarly favorable to the reception of the mission sent 
 thither by Gregory. Ethelbert, great-grandson of 
 Hengist, and now King of Kent, the principal king- 
 dom of the Heptarchy, had opened the way to the 
 entrance of God's Word that giveth light by marry- 
 
 [42] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 ing a Christian woman of the kindred Frankish race 
 in Gaul. Bertha, daughter of Charibert King of 
 Paris, and great-granddaughter of Clovis and Clotilda, 
 had brought with her to her husband 's court a Chris- 
 tian, Bishop Liudhard, as her confessor and chaplain. 
 He does not seem to have accomplished anything 
 towards Christianizing the Jutes here, although his 
 presence and influence had doubtless favorably dis- 
 posed Ethelbert towards the religion of his queen. 
 Liudhard was permitted to restore the ancient Ro- 
 mano-British Church of St. Martin at Canterbury. 
 He seems to have officiated there for years, but 
 probably died before the coming of St. Augustine. 
 Gregory's first contact with the English, in the per- 
 son of the slave-boys at Rome, cannot be told too 
 often, nor told better than in the familiar story of 
 Bede: '*It is reported that some merchants, having 
 just arrived at Rome on a certain day, exposed many 
 things for sale in the market-place, and abundance of 
 people resorted thither to buy ; Gregory himself went 
 with the rest, and, among other things, some boys were 
 set to sale, their bodies white, their countenances beau- 
 tiful, and their hair very fine. Having viewed them, 
 he asked from what country or nation they were 
 brought? and was told, from the island of Britain, 
 whose inhabitants were of such personal appearance. 
 He again inquired whether those islanders were Chris- 
 tians or still involved in the errors of paganism 1 and 
 was informed that they were pagans. Then fetching 
 a deep sigh from the bottom of his heart, **alas! 
 What pity," said he, "that the author of darkness 
 
 [43] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 is possessed of men of such fair countenances/' He 
 therefore asked again, what was the name of that 
 nation? and was answered that they were called 
 Angles. ''Right," said he, ''for they have an angelic 
 face, and it becomes such to be co-heirs with the angels 
 in heaven. What is the name," proceeded he, "of the 
 province from which they are brought?" It was re- 
 plied, that the name of that province was Deira. 
 "Truly are they De ira," said he, "withdrawn from 
 wrath, and called to the mercy of Christ. How is the 
 King of that province called?" They told him his 
 name was jElla : and here, alluding to the name, said, 
 "Allelulia, the praise of God the Creator must be 
 sung in these parts." Gregory must have been a 
 considerable punster, according to this story, and have 
 found relief to his overburdened heart, like Mr. 
 Lincoln, in frequent flashes of homely wit. He was 
 so profoundly impressed by this episode that he 
 eagerly offered himself as an evangelist to the fallen 
 angels of Anglia, and received the pope's reluctant 
 consent. He had traveled three days journey on his 
 way to England, when he was recalled by a popular 
 uprising and protest against his leaving Rome in her 
 own extremity. But a few years afterward, by a 
 similar popular movement, by the united voice of 
 senate and clergy and people, Gregory was forcibly 
 promoted from the position of deacon and abbot to 
 that of Supreme Pontiff. He found the Church which 
 he was now set to rule threatened with shipwreck at 
 its very centre. He himself compared it to "an old 
 and violently shattered ship which admitted the water 
 
 [44] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 on all sides, its timbers rotten, shaken by daily 
 storms." But that ship was not destined to sink 
 when it carried this new spiritual Csesar as its cap- 
 tain. Nor, amid his overwhelming cares, did he for- 
 get his old desire for a better conquest of Britain 
 than that of Csesar. It was, doubtless, his loving 
 recollection of the angel-faced lads which prompted 
 him to write to the steward of his estates in Gaul, 
 Candidius, to spend part of the income in purchasing 
 English boys that they might receive a Christian 
 education, and which made him censure the Gallican 
 bishops for their neglect of the English in this mat- 
 ter. "We are told that he often talked with his monks 
 of his hopes for the conversion of the English, and 
 he wrote about this time to his dear friend Eulogius, 
 bishop of Alexandria, invoking his prayers. In a de- 
 lightful little book by Charles Hole on ''Early Mis- 
 sions to and within the British Islands," he says, 
 "The straitened condition of Rome at that period 
 has been spoken of, and ought to be kept in view. . . . 
 If it ever occurred to Gregory that straitness at home 
 was any argument against Foreign Missions, and that 
 he should gather in all the Lombards before taking up 
 the cause of the Anglo-Saxons, he must have discarded 
 the suggestion. He carried on home missions and 
 foreign missions concurrently, and others have acted 
 in the same principle." It is a striking coincidence 
 that, at the very time when Gregory was contemplat- 
 ing a mission to the English, the Keltic missionary 
 Columban began his work among the Gauls, and Col- 
 umba had been preaching for some years to the pagan 
 
 [45] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 Picts. It is probable that these may have helped to 
 excite the missionary zeal of Gregory; for nothing is 
 more remarkable about him than his wide knowledge 
 of and keen interest in the work of every part of the 
 Church down to the minutest details. 
 
 But in the Spring of 596 the Pope took more 
 vigorous measures for the accomplishment of his de- 
 sire for the winning of the English to Christ. As 
 he could not go in person, he selected a substitute. 
 He chose Augustine, his familiar friend and prior 
 of his own monastery, to head a band of monks and 
 set forth on a mission to the Angles. They became 
 disheartened when they got as far as Provence in 
 Gaul and heard of the ferocious character of the 
 heathen in Britain. * * Struck with a sluggish timorous- 
 ness,'' as Bede has it, they even sent their leader back 
 to Rome to beg off from such a venture. But Gregory 
 was made of sterner stuff, and would have no turning 
 back. Their leader returned to them more resolute 
 than before and armed with the Pope's appointment 
 as abbot to the monks, and with the right to require 
 a rigid obedience. He brought with him a personal 
 letter from the Pope to the monks with these words, 
 "Let not the toil of the journey, nor the tongues of 
 evil-speaking men, deter you; but with all possible 
 earnestness and zeal perform that which by God's 
 direction you have undertaken, being assured that 
 much labor is followed by an eternal reward. ' ' 
 
 Next to Bede's History Gregory ^s Letters consti- 
 tute our chief source of information here. Of his 
 Letters about 838 have been preserved, not very many 
 
 [46] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 of them, however, bearing on this case. The journey 
 through Gaul was also smoothed for these pioneer 
 "Canterbury pilgrims" by Gregory's twelve com- 
 mendatory letters to bishops and princes along the 
 way. Provided also with Frankish interpreters, in 
 the memorable Spring of 597, the party landed in 
 Kent, at Ebbsfleet on the Isle of Thanet, where Hen- 
 gist and Horsa had first landed with their hordes 
 for the invasion of Britain. They sent a courteous 
 message to the King, announcing their arrival and 
 their errand. Without committing himself too far 
 Ethelbert accorded them a kindly welcome to his 
 country, and shortly after granted them an audience. 
 Seated with his nobles and thanes, he received the 
 emissaries of the Pontiff, who approached with what 
 dignity and ceremony they could command. They 
 advanced in solemn procession, bearing aloft in front 
 a silver cross and a painted figure of the Christ, sing- 
 ing their Litany and ''entreating the Lord for their 
 own salvation and that of those to whom they came, ' ' 
 the stately form of St. Augustine, towering like Saul 
 head and shoulders above his fellows, bringing up the 
 rear. The abbot, through his interpreter, preached 
 to the King and his court "The word of life;" to 
 which Ethelbert replied, — "Fair words and promises 
 are these; but seeing they are new and doubtful, I 
 cannot give in to them, and give up what I, with all 
 the English race, have so long observed." He gener- 
 ously promised, however, that the strangers should 
 be treated fairly and hospitably, and allowed to preach 
 their belief to his people. They were assigned a 
 
 [47] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 house in his capital city, ''the Burgh of the men of 
 Kent.'* And so, in stately procession the pilgrims 
 made their entrance into Canterbury, chanting their 
 pious intercession, ''We beseech Thee, Lord, in 
 Thy great mercy, let Thine anger and wrath be turned 
 away from this city and from Thy holy house, for 
 we have sinned. Alleluia." Here they resumed the 
 sacred routine of their monastic life, and at St. Mar- 
 tin's Church they "sang the Psalms, prayed, cele- 
 brated mass, preached and baptized." St. Martin's 
 church still stands, rebuilt in the thirteenth century, 
 but probably retaining yet some of the Roman work 
 of Bertha's Church; and the view from it is to a 
 churchman what its former Dean and historian Stan- 
 ley styles "one of the most inspiring to be found in 
 all the world." Soon the little band of missionaries 
 were cheered by the baptism of Ethelbert himself, 
 in which he was followed by many of his people. It 
 was on Whitsunday in the year of Grace 597 that this 
 Anglo-Saxon King entered into the unity of the Holy 
 Church of Christ. "Since the Baptism of Constan- 
 tine," says Count de Montalembert, "and, excepting 
 that of Clovis, there has not been any event of greater 
 moment in the annals of Christendom. . . . The Church 
 of Canterbury has possessed unparalleled splendors," 
 he adds, "No Church in the world, after the Church 
 of Rome, has been governed by greater men, or has 
 waged more glorious conflicts. But nothing in her 
 brilliant annals could eclipse the sweet and pure light 
 of that humble beginning." 
 Encouraged by his success, Augustine, according to 
 
 [481 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 Gregory's directions, crossed over to Gaul, and at 
 Aries, Nov. 16th, 597, was consecrated to be ''Arch- 
 bishop of the English" by Archbishop Virgilius and 
 other Frankish prelates. In 601 the Pope conferred 
 upon Augustine what had come to be a metropolitan 
 insignia, the Pall, which in later times came to have 
 a new and more dangerous meaning and to play a 
 prominent part in Papal history. On the Christmas 
 following Augustine's return to Canterbury he could 
 gladden the heart of the Pontiff by reporting the 
 baptism of over 10,000 converts, "the first fruits of 
 the Anglo-Saxon race to Christ." The King's own 
 palace was assigned to the first Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, and a church built in the days of the Romans 
 was restored and enlarged, and remodelled after St. 
 Peter's at Rome. This became "Christ Church" and 
 Canterbury Cathedral, the Mother-church of English 
 Christianity. The only remains of this original Cathe- 
 dral is "St. Augustine's Chair," in which so many 
 generations of Archbishops have been enthroned for 
 1300 years. Another restored British church, which 
 had become paganized, became "St. Pancras." Out- 
 side the city walls also rose a new monastery, for 
 which Ethelbert subsequently built a stately abbey- 
 church as a burial place for archbishops and kings — 
 the site of the present St. Augustine's Missionary Col- 
 lege. "The charter of this original monastery has 
 been brought to light in our day as the oldest authen- 
 tic record of the religious and political history of Eng- 
 land" (cf. "Rise and Progress of the British Com- 
 monwealth" by Sir Francis Palgrave). 
 
 [49] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 St. Augustine, good and true man as he was, was 
 not like St. Gregory a bom leader, bold in taking the 
 initiative. Fortunately he leaned hard on his superior, 
 and sought his advices and support as much as possi- 
 ble. We find him about this time sending two of his 
 companions, Laurentius and Peter, to Rome asking 
 re-enforcements for his work, and the counsel of his 
 chief for the administration of his new Metropolitan 
 See. His letters to the Pope reveal a rather narrow 
 mind and a lack of originality in striking contrast to 
 the broad and statesmanlike policy of Gregory in re- 
 ply to the nine questions proposed by Augustine. 
 "They are a curious collection," says Dr. Alfred 
 Plummer. "With regard to some of them, we won- 
 der how any reasonable Christian, with a moderate 
 knowledge of Scripture, could be in any doubt. With 
 regard to others, our wonder is given to Gregory's 
 admirable answers. Augustine asks whether two 
 brothers can marry two sisters; and Gregory says, 
 * ' Of course they may. ' ' Augustine asks whether men 
 may marry their stepmothers ; and Gregory says, ' ' Of 
 course they may not." Surely, Augustine might have 
 spared the Pope the trouble of answering such ques- 
 tions as these." 
 
 We can only notice some of the most serious points 
 in this correspondence. Augustine asks for direction 
 about the different Liturgies then in use in Rome and 
 Gaul and elsewhere. The Pope advises him not to 
 alhere too rigidly even to the Roman Liturgy which 
 Gregory himself had recently revised, but to adopt 
 whatever he found best in the Galliean or other use, — 
 
 [60] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 **My pleasure is, that you should with great care 
 select whatever you think will best please Almighty 
 God, wherever you find it, whether in the Church of 
 Rome or in the Church of Gaul, or in any other 
 Church. And then plant firmly in the Church of the 
 English that which you have collected from many 
 Churches, depositing it in the minds of the English 
 as their custom or use." 
 
 It was evidently the purpose of the Pontiff to estab- 
 lish the Roman mission in England, as soon as possi- 
 ble, into a national and autonomous branch of the one 
 Catholic Church, with the liberty to determine its own 
 rites and ceremonies and administer its own affairs. 
 In his letter to Augustine, Gregory speaks of ''The 
 Roman Church," of ''The Church of Gaul," and of 
 "the new Church— The Church of the English"— 
 exactly what is styled in Magna Charter and in the 
 great act of supremacy under Henry VIII, "the 
 Church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia." As 
 the late Bishop of Bristol, Dr. Browne, who has made 
 this subject the study of his life, declares, "He once 
 mentions the Roman Church, when a question of Au- 
 gustine forces him to do so; but he only mentions it 
 then side by side with others, — ' ' the Roman Church, ' ' 
 he says, "the GaUican Church," and any other 
 Church." And he mentions it only to say expressly 
 that the English Church was not to be bound to fol- 
 low it even in the most solemn act of the Church, the 
 celebration of Masses." ("Augustine and His Com- 
 panions.") It ought to be added that not once, in all 
 the Letters of Gregory preserved by Bede, does he 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 say anything about the English Church being subject 
 to the Roman Church or to the Pope, or claim to be 
 the successor of St. Peter. 
 
 On one important point, however, Gregory's usual 
 wisdom and tact and breadth of view seem to have 
 failed him. For he gave Augustine a piece of advice 
 which proved a stumbling-block to the Pope's other- 
 wise statesman-like policy, which went far to prevent 
 a wooden man like Augustine from doing a much 
 greater work in England. Augustine had asked this 
 question, **How are we to deal with the bishops of 
 the provinces of Gaul and the British Isles?" The 
 Pope had replied, "From the ancient times of my 
 predecessors, the bishop of Aries has received the 
 pallium ; we must by no means deprive him of the 
 authority he has received; we give you no authority 
 among Galilean bishops. All the bishops of the British 
 Isles we commit to you, my brother, that those who are 
 unlearned may be taught, the weak may be strength- 
 ened by persuasions, the perverse corrected by au- 
 thority.^' 
 
 Gregory made a blunder here, and exceeded his 
 own authority and Augustine 's too, in conferring upon 
 the latter as Archbishop and Metropolitan of the new 
 English Church a jurisdiction over the British bishops 
 of a very old church, which neither of them possessed, 
 and which the bishops in Wales would be sure to 
 resent. According to the 8th Canon of the Ecumeni- 
 cal Council of Ephesus, **None of the bishops shall 
 take possession of a province that was not from the 
 first and originally under his hand or that of his pre- 
 
 [62] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 decessors." Gregory was more than justified in send- 
 ing missionaries to convert a new and heathen people 
 in an old land, from which both the Church and State 
 of earlier times had withdrawn. But he had no right 
 to subject unasked the British bishops outside the 
 Anglo-Saxon dominions to the new See of Canter- 
 bury. Even if he had the right, the scheme was 
 foredoomed to failure. If not a crime, it was certainly 
 a blunder, — and Gregory was not given to blundering. 
 Doubtless, his information about the Church in 
 Britain, in its then isolated condition, was meagre 
 enough and Augustine's was more so; but, while he 
 did not undertake to play the Pope in the later sense 
 of that word, yet already we can see the thin edge 
 of the wedge of the inherent universal supremacy of 
 the Roman See beginning to obtrude itself. As Canon 
 Bright has it, ''Vehement as were Gregory's protests 
 against the adoption by the Patriarch of Constantino- 
 ple, or the application to himself, of the title of 'Uni- 
 versal Bishop,' he always acted on that theory re- 
 specting his own office, which had been gradually 
 developing itself from the early part of the fifth cen- 
 tury, and was to develop itself yet more in aftertimes, 
 pope after pope never retracting, but adopting and 
 uniformly improving upon the pretentions of their 
 predecessors." (Early English Church History.") 
 
 In other respects the general scheme of organiza- 
 tion prescribed by Gregory for Augustine to follow 
 was sagacious and far-sighted, but I cannot follow it 
 further. After all, the Papacy, or something like 
 it, as the best Protestant historians admit, seems to 
 
 [53] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHUKCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 have been inevitable to meet the demands of the Mid- 
 dle Ages for a powerful centralized government of 
 the Church to confront the chaos and disintegration 
 of the Roman Empire and the swarming of the Ger- 
 manic barbarians. As popes go, Gregory was cer- 
 tainly one of the best, and beats Henry VIII out of 
 sight for Founder of the English Church. Henry was 
 more than 900 years too late for that job, and cer- 
 tainly had no intention of starting a new Church. It 
 has been well said, *'We must not confound Rome 
 the enlightener of the nations in the sixth century 
 with Rome, the corrupter of the nations in the six- 
 teenth century.*^ 
 
 Through the instrumentality of Ethelbert arrange- 
 ments were made for a meeting between Augustine 
 and the British bishops of Wales in the year 602 or 
 603 at a place long after known as *' Augustine 's 
 Oak'' — a location still in dispute. ''Augustine," 
 according to Bede, whom we follow closely, ''began to 
 try to persuade them by brotherly admonitions to 
 hold Catholic peace with himself and to undertake 
 in conjunction with him the work of preaching the 
 Gospel to the heathen for the Lord's sake. ' ' Of course 
 there was room for considerable difference of opinion 
 as to what constituted "Catholic peace." On this 
 crux Bede is not explicit. The Britons were told 
 that they did not keep Easter Sunday at the proper 
 time and did several other things which were against 
 the unity of the Church — evidently matters of little 
 importance. "After a long disputation, they did not 
 comply with the entreaties, exhortations or rebukes 
 
 [54] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 of Augustine and his companions, but preferred their 
 own traditions — they could not depart from their an- 
 cient customs without the consent and leave of their 
 people, ' ' even when Augustine is said to have clinched 
 his arguments by giving sight to a blind man after 
 the British had attempted the miracle and failed. 
 They proposed therefore a second meeting at which 
 more of their number would be present. To this 
 second conference ''there came seven bishops of the 
 Britons, and many most learned men, particularly 
 from their most noble monastery" at Bangor Iscoed 
 near Chester. Unfortunately Augustine received this 
 august body sitting in his chair, which seemed dis- 
 courteous and too archi-episcopal to promise a success- 
 ful issue. But, spite of his supposed haughty bearing, 
 his terms were really not illiberal, as Bede reports 
 them. "He said to them, 'You act in many par- 
 ticulars contrary to our custom, or rather the custom 
 of the universal Church, and yet, if you will comply 
 with me in these three points: viz., to keep Easter at 
 due time; to administer Baptism by which we are 
 bom again to God according to the custom of the 
 holy Roman Apostolic Church; and jointly with us 
 to preach the Word of God to the English nation, we 
 will readily tolerate all the other things you do, 
 though contrary to our customs.' They answered 
 that they would do none of these things, nor receive 
 him as their archbishop ; for they alleged among them- 
 selves that if he would not rise up to us, how much 
 more will he condemn us as of no worth if we shall 
 begin to be under his subjection ? ' ' There must have 
 
 [56] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 been more in this interview than appears on the 
 surface. The two insuperable hindrances to union 
 on the part of the Britons were doubtless race-hatred 
 of the Anglo-Saxons, who for 150 years had been 
 their cruel conquerors, and submission to the au- 
 thority of an unknown archbishop of the English — 
 which meant to them the submission of seven bishops 
 of an old beloved church to this one solitary bishop 
 of a brand-new church just started. As in all quar- 
 rels there were faults no doubt on both sides, and 
 the breach which it took more than five centuries to 
 heal, was disastrous to both parties, especially to the 
 British Christians, whose help was sorely needed in 
 the conversion of the English heathen and who con- 
 tributed nothing at all to that good and glorious 
 work. The Scotch-Irish, who shared their traditions 
 to the full, but not their persecutions, and who kept 
 aloof for a time, did at a later day render heroic and 
 most successful service in evangelizing the Anglo- 
 Saxons and in the making of the English Church. 
 The conference for ''Catholic Peace" at Augustine's 
 Oak ended in sectarian and schismatic strife and bit- 
 terness. This ''Synod of the Oak" might well have 
 been called the "Synod of the Oaks," for there was 
 tough and unyielding material in both parties. Bede 
 himself, whose sympathy was strongly with the Roman 
 Mission, but who was broad-minded enough to love 
 and revere the holy men of the Scottish Church, speaks 
 very harshly of the British Church, and closes his 
 account of the conference with their bishops with 
 these stinging words: "To them the man of God, 
 
 [56] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 Augustine, is said, in a threatening manner to have 
 foretold that in case they would not join in unity 
 with their brethren, they should be warred upon by 
 their enemies, and, if they would not preach the way 
 of life to the English nation, they should at their 
 hands undergo the vengeance of death. All which, 
 through the dispensation of the Divine judgment, fell 
 out exactly as he had predicted." Nine years or 
 more, after Augustine's death, there was a terrible 
 massacre of these monks of Bangor Iscoed by order 
 of Ethelfrid the pagan Anglican King. 
 
 For centuries the British Church continued dis- 
 tinct and independent alike of Rome and of Canter- 
 bury, preserving their peculiarities of race and lan- 
 guage and ecclesiastical usage, along with their Cath- 
 olic faith and polity — having done much for the 
 evangelizing of their Irish and Scotch kindred, who 
 in turn did vastly more for the conversion of England 
 and of Continental Europe. Ultimately, when the 
 Britons of Wales and Cornwall were conquered by 
 the English, when their chiefs became at last subject 
 to the English Government under the Normans, their 
 bishops also submitted to the Primate of the English 
 Church. It was in this slow and gradual way — mainly 
 from the tenth to the thirteenth century — that the 
 earliest Church of old Britain was absorbed by and 
 incorporated with the Anglo-Norman Church, so that 
 their history becomes an interesting part of the his- 
 tory of the Church of England. 
 
 Failing utterly to secure any additional laborers for 
 his vast missionary field from the Welsh bishops, 
 
 [67] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 Augustine had to content himself with the small re- 
 inforcement which Gregory had recently sent him, 
 including the priests Mellitus, Justus and Paulinus. 
 He consecrated Justus as first bishop of a new See 
 in Kent at Rochester. Outside of Kent he was only 
 able through Ethelbert's influence over his nephew, 
 Sabert, King of the East Anglicans, to revive the old 
 British See of Roman days at London. Here he estab- 
 lished Mellitus for a very short-lived Episcopate, 
 For each of these Ethelbert made liberal contribu- 
 tions, and St. Paul's Cathedral in London still owns 
 an estate in Essex from the King of Kent's donation. 
 Shortly before Augustine's death, he consecrated 
 one of his original companions, Laurentius, as his 
 own successor at Canterbury (which was contrary to 
 the Nicene Canons) "in fear," says Bede, "lest the 
 unsettled Church might totter and fall if left des- 
 titute of a bishop for even an hour." In the year 
 604, May 26th, after a career in England of only 
 seven years, having nobly laid the sure foundation of 
 a work destined to survive all the changes and chances 
 of English history, the first archbishop of Canterbury 
 rested from his labors. ' ' Whatever his shortcomings, ' ' 
 says the late Canon Bright of Oxford, "Augustine of 
 Canterbury was a good man, a devout and laborious 
 Christian worker, who could and did face threatening 
 difficulties and accept serious risks in loyalty to a 
 sacred cause; a missionary whose daily conduct was 
 a recommendation of his preaching, who could im- 
 press and convince men of various classes in a 
 Teutonic people that had little in common with his 
 
 [58] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 Italian antecedents; who, as archbishop, did his duty, 
 as he read it, with all his might, if not without mis- 
 takes or failures, such as we may be tempted to judge 
 more harshly than they merit ; who, acting thus, accom- 
 plished more than appears at first sight, in that he 
 originated so much of the work that was to make 
 England Christian." (''Early English Church His- 
 tory.") 
 
 Gregory the Great died shortly before Augustine, 
 March 12th, 604. English and American churchmen 
 have good reason to be proud of so prominent a per- 
 sonage for the Founder of their Church, and no 
 reason to be ashamed of the lesser man whom the 
 Master-builder sent to lay the corner-stone. 
 
 And yet how small the beginnings of so big an 
 enterprise, at the time of their death, and how un- 
 promising the outlook for their immediate followers. 
 Neither of these daring leaders lived to see much 
 more than the laying of a sure foundation. Gregory 
 the Great might have said, with a greater than he, 
 St. Paul himself, one of the two Founders of his own 
 Church at Rome, ''I have laid the foundation, and 
 another buildeth thereon." Augustine's immediate 
 successors must have found a situation well-nigh 
 hopeless. Under Augustine and his associates Chris- 
 tianity was planted in Kent and in Essex, but was 
 soon violently uprooted in the latter, and barely 
 escaped the same fate in the former. After his death 
 a similar work Avas successfully started by Paulinus 
 in Northumbria, which was w^ell-nigh wrecked when 
 that tough old pagan, Penda of Mercia, upset the 
 
 [59] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 dynasty which had accepted Christianity. Other 
 missionaries from various quarters, at different times, 
 converted the several kingdoms of the Heptarchy. 
 And these converts were organized into one English 
 Church on the foundation and under the system in- 
 augurated by Augustine, and completed by his 
 stronger successor and far greater organizer. Arch- 
 bishop Theodore, of whom we shall hear later. 
 
 Lawrence, the second Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 seems to have been a more conciliatory man than his 
 predecessor, but had no better success in his efforts 
 to heal the breach with the Keltic Christians. He 
 tried to accomplish with the Irish what had failed 
 with the British bishops, and addressed a gracious 
 letter to ''our most dear brothers, the lords, bishops 
 and abbots, through all Scotia" (i. e. Ireland). He 
 expressed his deep pain that Dagan, an Irish bishop, 
 who had lately visited Canterbury, had declined to 
 eat with the Roman missionaries, or even in the 
 same house, and his own strong desire and hope of 
 better things from the rest of his Irish brothers." 
 But these brothers were not yet ready to fall on the 
 neck of those whom they hardly counted half-brothers. 
 With no better results he had a similar correspond- 
 ence with his British cousins, who did not even answer 
 his letter. 
 
 King Ethelbert died in 616, after a reign of fifty-six 
 years. He should be remembered, not only as the 
 first Christian King of the English race, but also as 
 the '^author of the earliest extant set of written 
 Laws which embody the old English customs; and 
 
 [60] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 the first place in these is given to the affairs of the 
 Church. " ' ' Among other benefits, ' ' says Bede, ' ' which 
 he conferred upon the nation, by the advice of wise 
 persons (the Witan), he introduced judicial decrees 
 after the Roman model ; which, being written in Eng- 
 lish, are still kept and observed by them. Among 
 which he in the first place, set down what satisfaction 
 should be given by those who should steal anything 
 belonging to the Church, the bishop, or the other 
 clergy, resolving to give protection to those whose 
 doctrines he had embraced." These *'Laws of Ethel- 
 bert," still surviving textually, have been called **the 
 earliest specimen of jurisprudence in a barbarous 
 tongue. ' ' 
 
 After Ethelbert's death Archbishop Lawrence had 
 all he could do to hold his own in Kent. Eadbald, 
 the unworthy son and successor of Ethelbert, took to 
 himself for second wife the young widow of his father, 
 and was ready to repudiate a religion which inter- 
 fered with this popular old Teutonic practice. It 
 was with great difficulty that he was brought to a 
 better mind, but most of his people relapsed into their 
 original heathenism and did not have far to go. In 
 Essex, especially London, the repudiation of Chris- 
 tianity and of its Bishop Mellitus w^as complete after 
 that prelate refused to give the sacramental bread to 
 those unbaptized barbarians, the two sons of the late 
 King Sabert. Essex became too hot to hold the 
 Bishop of London, and he beat a hasty retreat from 
 that bad town. Justus of Rochester joined him in his 
 flight, and the two bishops did not feel safe until they 
 
 [61] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 had put the English channel behind them and landed 
 in Gaul. Nothing short of one of Bede's timely mir- 
 acles stopped the archbishop himself from sharing the 
 voyage of his brothers of London and Rochester. The 
 miracle which kept Laurentius from putting to sea 
 was an apparition of St. Peter to him the night be- 
 fore, who rebuked him for his cowardice, and scourged 
 him soundly ' ' with apostolic blows and knocks. ' ' The 
 same miracle was made to do double duty by fright- 
 ening King Eadbald into dropping his unlawful wife 
 and returning to the bosom of the Church. Justus 
 was brought back to his abandoned flock by the com- 
 bined efforts of Archbishop and King. But the Lon- 
 doners declined Mellitus with thanks, and continued 
 stubborn in their heathenism for another forty years. 
 Mellitus and Justus each in turn succeeded Lauren- 
 tius as Archbishop of Canterbury. In fact, when 
 Justus's turn came, he was the only bishop of the 
 Roman mission left in England. He had only to 
 appoint himself archbishop, and supply any irregu- 
 larities by receiving the Pope's pall and permission 
 to consecrate singly one Romanus for the vacant See 
 at Rochester. 
 
 And now the scene shifts from Canterbury far 
 northward, to the land, at last, from which had come 
 Gregory's angelic boys of Deira. The only other off- 
 shoot from the sickly ecclesiastical plant in Kent was 
 a short-lived one that sprang into sudden and rapid 
 growth in the kingdom of Northumbria, now become 
 what Kent had once been, the most powerful kingdom 
 of the Heptarchy. Northumbria was the name given 
 
 [62] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 to the vast region north of the river Humber up to 
 the firth of Forth. It was divided into two provinces, 
 Deira being the southern, with its capital at York, 
 and corresponding somewhat to the present York- 
 shire. The northern province was called Bernicia, 
 with its capital at Bamborough, including the coun- 
 ties of Durham, Northumberland and Lothians. 
 ' ' Northumbria, " says the Count de Montalembert, 
 ''was not merely the largest kingdom of the Saxon 
 Pleptarchy, — it is also that whose history is the most 
 animated, dramatic and varied. This is naturally ex- 
 plained by the fact that it is the birthplace of the 
 venerable Bede. This great and honest historian was 
 born and always lived in Northumbria. Hence in his 
 interesting narratives a natural prominence is given 
 to the men and affairs of his native region along with 
 an exact and detailed reproduction of the local tradi- 
 tions and personal recollections which he treasured up 
 and reported with such scrupulous care." (''The 
 Monks of the West.") 
 
 It is a notable fact that the most successful way of 
 converting the Anglo-Saxon Kings, who "would not 
 obey the Word," was through "the godly conver- 
 sion of their wives." This became the regular use 
 of the Saxon Church for royalty at least — almost the 
 ' ' Established Religion ' ' of the English Kings. North- 
 umbria, Mercia and Sussex followed the precedent 
 established by Ethelbert at Canterbury. In each alike 
 a Christian princess, with the aid of her chaplain, 
 won over to her own faith her heathen husband — a 
 
 [63] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 good old English custom which crops up every once 
 in a while throughout the Anglo-Saxon race. 
 
 The mission of the Roman Paulinus, followed by 
 the far more fruitful mission of the Scotch-Irish 
 Aidan, to Northumbria (of which I shall speak in my 
 next Lecture) were the most promising events of 
 which we have heard yet in the making of the Eng- 
 lish Church — the most advanced steps toward the 
 Conversion of the English. While the extensive work 
 of Paulinus had little permanent result, it opened the 
 way for greater things later. The story of these two 
 wonderful missions is full of interest and instruction. 
 
 Edwin, whose name has been perpetuated in the 
 city of Edinburg, was now King of Northumbria and 
 Bretwalda, or Lord of Britain. He was the son of 
 that -^Ua, from whose dominions had come the slave 
 boys that touched the heart of Gregory, and in whose 
 kingdom he would have '* Alleluia" sung. His prayer 
 was about to be realized at last. Edwin asked for the 
 hand of Ethelburga, daughter of Ethelbert of Kent, 
 and sister of Eadbald then reigning. The royal con- 
 sent to his sister's marriage was given on condition 
 that she should be allowed the free exercise of the 
 Christian religion and the service of a chaplain at 
 the pagan court. The terms were accepted, and Ed- 
 win expressed his own willingness to adopt the faith 
 of his bride if, in the opinion of his wise men, it was 
 found a better religion. Paulinus was consecrated 
 bishop in the summer of 625, and went with the new 
 queen to her northern home, to be to her what Bishop 
 Liudhard had been to her mother Bertha in then 
 
 [04] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 pagan Kent. Edwin, like Ethelbert, was in no par- 
 ticular hurry to change his religion. But on Easter 
 Eve, 626, the King was wounded and nearly slain by 
 an assassin sent by the King of Wessex, and that 
 same **most holy night of the Lord's Patssion," the 
 queen gave birth to a daugher. Paulinus seized this 
 opportunity to press his message home to the King's 
 heart. The father consented that the babe Eanfleda 
 should be baptized in her mother's faith, and prom- 
 ised to become a Christian himself should he triumph 
 over his enemy in the war at hand. On his return 
 home victorious, he agreed to consult the Witan, or 
 wise men of his kingdom, and summoned them to 
 Goodmanham near York. Then and there he asked 
 his counsellors what they thought of the proposed 
 change of religion. Bede has preserved two of the 
 opinions expressed which make a striking contrast. 
 The chief priest named Coifi gave an answer which 
 revealed a selfish and utilitarian old heathen of the 
 deepest dye. ''The old worship,*' said he, "seems to 
 me worth nothing : no man has practiced it more than 
 I, and yet many fare better and have more favor at 
 your hand. If the gods had any power, they would 
 rather help me, who have served them more than 
 others. Let us then see what this new lore is good 
 for; if it is better than the old, let us straightway 
 follow it.*' — Very different was the touching and 
 beautiful answer of another thane, who showed that 
 God had not left himself without witness in one poetic 
 soul : 
 
 "I will tell you, King, what methinks man's life 
 
 [66] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 is like, Sometimes, when your hall is lit up for sup- 
 per on a wild winter's evening and warmed by a fire, 
 in the midst a sparrow flies in by one door, takes 
 shelter for a moment in the warmth, and then flies 
 out again by another door, and is lost in the stormy 
 darkness. No one in the hall sees the bird before it 
 enters, nor after it has gone forth; it is only seen 
 while it hovers near the fire. So it is, I ween, with 
 this brief span of our life in this world; what has 
 gone before it, what will come after it, — of this we 
 know nothing. If the strange teacher can tell us, by 
 all means let him be heard. ' * 
 
 Wordsworth has embodied this parable in one of his 
 beautiful ''Ecclesiastical Sonnets": — 
 
 ** Man's life is like a sparrow, mighty King! 
 That — while at banquet with your chiefs you sit 
 Housed near a blazing fire — is seen to flit 
 Safe from the wintry tempest. Fluttering, — 
 Here did it enter; there on hasty wing, 
 Flies out, and passes on from cold to cold; 
 But whence it came, we know not, nor behold 
 Whither it goes. Even such, that transient Thing, 
 The human Soul ; not utterly unknown 
 While in the Body lodged, her warm abode; 
 But from what world she came, what woe or weal 
 On her departure waits, no tongue hath shown : 
 This mystery if the Stranger can reveal. 
 His be a welcome cordially bestowed." 
 
 Bede has not recorded the Sermon of Paulinus on 
 this momentous occasion, but he has drawn a very 
 vivid picture of the preacher and of the impression 
 
 [66] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 which he made. As the spokesman for Christ seized 
 this golden opportunity of presenting to his eager 
 audience the Christian answer to the ' ' whence ? ' ' and 
 the *' whither?" of man's brief life on earth, — as the 
 preacher stood forth there at Goodmanham, "tall, 
 with a slight stoop, black hair, a thin face, an aquiline 
 nose, an aspect at once venerable and awe-striking, ' ' — 
 to proclaim the Gospel of eternal life, it must have 
 been an impressive scene. Even Coifi was lifted for 
 the while out of his sordid selfishness, and, we are told, 
 ''saw the truth shining out clearly in this new teach- 
 ing." The King no longer halted between two 
 opinions, and to his demand as to who should be the 
 first to destroy the altars of a discarded religion. 
 ''That will I do," cried Coifi. Calling for horse and 
 arms, the excited priest rode straight for the heathen 
 temple nearby, hurled his spear at it, and bade his 
 followers set fire to it. The Nation now by its Witena- 
 gemot accepted the better religion of their King. Ed- 
 win erected at once a wooden chapel at York where 
 now stands the stately and splendid Minster, and on 
 Easter Eve, 627, he was baptized in the spring still 
 preserved in the crypt of the Cathedral. This was 
 the birthday of the Northumbrian Church. Among 
 the nobility baptized then with their sovereign was 
 his great niece, the future illustrious St. Hilda of 
 Whitby Abbey. Paulinus was established at York as 
 its bishop, and the King began to build a larger and 
 more august church of stone enclosing the little wooden 
 structure. From this centre far and wide through the 
 vast reeilm of King Edwin, from Edinburgh to the 
 
 [67] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 Humber, the bishop traveled on foot, with the good 
 James as his deacon, preaching, catechising, baptiz- 
 ing his converts in large numbers and laying a founda- 
 tion on which those who came after him were to build 
 up a great and glorious church. His journeys ex- 
 tended as far as to Lincoln, where soon arose a stone 
 church of noble workmanship not far from that 
 ** sovereign hill" on which stands Lincoln Cathedral. 
 In this first church, as Bishop of York and the only 
 bishop then surviving in England, Paulinus conse- 
 crated Honorius as the fifth Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury. 
 
 But an appalling calamity fell upon the kingdom 
 and Church of Northumbria in the year 633, after six 
 years of arduous pioneer work by Paulinus. The 
 rising and able King of Mercia in the midlands of 
 England, Penda, well named "the Strenuous," the 
 uncompromising foe of Christianity and champion of 
 the old religion, had formed an alliance with Cad- 
 wallon of Gwynedd, the British find Christian King of 
 North Wales. He had long thirsted to avenge the 
 slaughter of his people under an earlier Northum- 
 brian ruler Ethelfrid, who had massacred the 1200 
 monks of Bangor Iscoed. This powerful confederacy 
 proved irresistible even to the strongest kingdom of 
 the Heptarchy. At Heathfield, in Yorkshire, Edwin 
 and his son Osfrid were slain in battle, his army was 
 utterly routed and well nigh destroyed. The fury of 
 the conquerors knew no bounds, and Cadwallon ex- 
 ceeded even the relentless Penda in his cruel slaugh- 
 ter of the hated English, sparing neither women nor 
 
 [68] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 children, nor his own fellow-Christians among the 
 Angles. The Church of Northumbria was almost 
 wiped out. When the terrible tidings was brought to 
 Paulinus, along with the head of the beloved Edwin, 
 the bishop fled with the widowed Queen Ethelburga 
 and her daughter Eanfled to Kent, just before the 
 Pall of Archbishop of York reached him. Paulinus 
 soon retired to the vacant See of Rochester, where he 
 ended his days. Until the dawning of a better day 
 and the coming of a new missionary force to Northum- 
 bria, only the courageous and constant Deacon James 
 seems to have remained there to keep alive the smoul- 
 dering fires of the Christian faith ; which would burst 
 erelong into a flame that would enlighten England 
 afresh, beginning at Northumbria. 
 
 The death of the Christian King was almost in- 
 variably at this time a death-blow to the Church of 
 his kingdom, and was followed by a relapse into 
 heathenism. Indeed from the beginning of the Eng- 
 lish Church the King played a most important part 
 in ecclesiastical affairs. But the collapse in North- 
 umbria was the worst blow which had yet fallen upon 
 the Roman missionaries. Forty years after the land- 
 ing of Augustine, his followers were again shut up 
 within the one kingdom of Kent. A more concen- 
 trated effort at the start would probably have pro- 
 duced more permanent results than the attempt to 
 spread out too widely. Depth rather than breadth 
 was what was now needed, and this was what the Scots 
 would shortly supply. But before the coming of the 
 Scots, there were two other zealous missionaries un- 
 
 [69] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 der the Roman dominance, but independent — one of 
 them at least — of the See of Canterbury, who won 
 two other kingdoms of the Heptarchy to Christ. To 
 these we will now turn our attention briefly. 
 
 While Paulinus was evangelizing the vast regions 
 of Bernicia and Deira which constituted Northum- 
 bria, the conversion of East Angelia (Norfolk and 
 Suffolk) was going on, started from another source. 
 An earlier effort from Canterbury had proved utterly 
 abortive. In the time of the good King Ethelbert, 
 and under his influence, his nephew Redwald, then 
 King of East Anglia, had received Baptism; but in 
 this unusual case his queen was hostile to Chris- 
 tianity and induced her husband to attempt a re- 
 markable compromise between Christianity and 
 paganism by setting up in the same temple an altar 
 to Christ and another to the heathen deities, so that 
 his people, like the ancient Samaritans, might "fear 
 the Lord and serve their own gods.'* The pioneer 
 of a new movement among the East Anglians was a 
 monk from Burgundy named Felix, who had offered 
 himself for work among the English to Honorius, 
 Archbishop of Canterbury and had been assigned to 
 this field as likely to be a promising one. For the 
 then King Sigbert had recently become a Christian 
 during a residence in Gaul, and Felix was warmly 
 welcomed to his court. It seems highly probable that 
 both Felix and Sigbert had received a missionary im- 
 pulse from the Irish monks in Gaul under Columban. 
 We hear now for the first time of the Gallican Church 
 taking some part in the conversion of the English, 
 for neglecting which they had been censured by 
 
 [70] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 Gregory. Here king and bishop worked together in 
 the cause of Christ, as later in Northumbria, and the 
 King seems to have led the way in person. In 631 
 Bishop Felix established his See at Dunwich on the 
 Suffolk coast and built a school and a monastery from 
 which he evangelized the East Anglians successfully. 
 He was also re-enforced by an Irish monk of noble 
 birth, Fursey, who brought from Ireland with him 
 two brothers and two other priests. Fursey also was 
 welcomed by Sigbert, and became greatly beloved 
 by his people for his saintly character and effective 
 preaching. This was the first instance of a union of 
 forces between the Keltic and the Roman missionaries, 
 and Sigbert deserves credit for succeeding where 
 Canterbury had failed, especially as we hear of op- 
 position to Fursey from the monks of Canterbury. 
 The schools and monasteries founded under these mis- 
 sionaries soon furnished East Anglia with a native 
 clerg>% who made Christianity a permanent power in 
 this kingdom. 
 
 A few years later, in 634, there landed in what is 
 now Hampshire the man who did for Wessex what 
 Felix did for East Anglia, and a work of greater im- 
 portance because of the dominant position which 
 Wessex subsequently attained in England. This man 
 was named Birinus, an Italian, but in no wise con- 
 nected with the Canterbury monks. He had offered 
 himself to the then Pope, who had the same name as the 
 contemporary Archbishop of Canterbury, Honorius, to 
 ''scatter the seeds of the holy faith where no teacher 
 as yet had visited. " It is this Pope Honorius I., whose 
 
 [71] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 condemnation for holding the monothelite heresy by 
 the sixth Ecumenical Council and by several later 
 popes stands somewhat in the way of the modern doc- 
 trine of Papal Infallibility. Pope Honorius, fortu- 
 nately, was sounder on the missionary question than 
 on some others, and accepted Birinus and had him 
 consecrated bishop by Asterius, Archbishop of Milan, 
 sojourning for the while in Genoa. Birinus found the 
 West Saxons heathen enough to satisfy him. There 
 was no need to go further to find a denser darkness, 
 so he set to work here in partihus infidelium. Birinus 
 began at the top, in the usual style then, and soon won 
 a royal convert in the person of Cynegils, King of 
 Wessex, who was duly baptized under very interest- 
 ing circumstances. Cynegils had for sponsor no less 
 a personage than the new King of Northumbria, 
 Oswald, who was to do so much to win back his people 
 to Christ, as we shall hear in our next Lecture. This 
 prince had come to woo Cynegil's daughter for his 
 own queen and so he happened to have the pleasure 
 of standing sponser for his future son-in-law. Bishop 
 Birinus, with such backing from royalty, was success- 
 ful in making many converts among nobles and people. 
 He established his episcopal seat at Dorchester, where 
 the King gave him ample lands. Since Ethelbert, 
 King of Kent, Cynegils was the most important acces- 
 sion to the Church because Wessex afterwards drew 
 to itself the other kingdoms until its King was King 
 of England. From this royal line of Cerdic the 
 Saxon came Alfred the Great and the English succes- 
 sion straight down to Queen Victoria and her son and 
 grandson. 
 
 [72] 
 
A Supplement to Lecture No. II 
 
 The Coming of Augustine and the Roman Mission 
 TO THE English 
 
 Excursus. 
 
 At the opening of this course of Lectures I spoke 
 of the English Church as a principal agent in the 
 making of the English Nation, and a most potent 
 influence in the development and history of the Eng- 
 lish people, their character and institutions. The 
 beginning of English Christianity is of the utmost 
 importance because of the immense and far-reaching 
 results. I have recently found a remarkable state- 
 ment of this by a brilliant French Roman Catholic 
 writer. ''In modem Europe,*' says the Count de 
 Montalembert, ''at a distance of seven leagues from 
 France, within sight of our northern shores, there 
 exists a nation whose empire is more vast than that 
 of Alexander or the Cessars, and which is at once the 
 fiercest and most powerful, the richest and most man- 
 ful, the boldest and best regulated in the world. No 
 other nation offers so instructive a study, so original 
 an aspect, or contrasts so remarkable. She is of all 
 the modem races and of all Christian nations the 
 one which has best preserved the three fundamental 
 bases of every society which is worthy of man — the 
 spirit of freedom, the domestic character, and the 
 religious mind. How, then, has this nation in which 
 
 [73] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 a perfectly pagan pride survives and triumphs, and 
 which has nevertheless remained, even in the bosom 
 of error, the most religious of all European nations 
 become Christian? . . . This is surely a question 
 of radical interest among all the great questions of 
 history, and one which takes new importance and in- 
 terest when it is considered that upon the conversion 
 of England there has depended and still depends, 
 the conversion of so many millions of souls. English 
 Christianity has been the cradle of Christianity in 
 Germany; from the depths of Germany, missionaries 
 formed by the Anglo-Saxons have carried the faith 
 into Scandinavia and among the Slavs; and even at 
 the present time, either by the fruitful expansion of 
 Irish orthodoxy, or by the obstinate zeal of the 
 Protestant propaganda. Christian societies which speak 
 English and live like Englishmen come into being 
 every day throughout North America, in the two In- 
 dies, in immense Australia and in the Isles of the 
 Pacific. The Christianity of nearly half the world 
 flows, or will flow, from the fountain which first burst 
 forth upon British soil. 
 
 It is possible to answer this fundamental question 
 with the closest precision. No country in the world 
 has received the Christian faith more directly from 
 the Church of Rome, or more exclusively by the min- 
 istration of monks. . . . From whence came these 
 monks ? From two very distinct sources — from Rome 
 and Ireland. English Christianity was produced by 
 the rivalry, and sometimes by the conflict, of the 
 monastic missionaries of the Roman and of the Keltic 
 
 [74] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 Church." ("The Monks of the West," Vol. I., Book 
 VIII, pp. 643-647.) 
 
 There has been so much confusion of mind and 
 inaccuracy of statement about the relation of the first 
 Church of the English race to the old British Church 
 on the one hand, and to the older Roman Church on 
 the other, that we may well attempt to make this 
 important matter as plain as possible. The principal 
 source of confusion is the vague word *^ Keltic.'' The 
 Count of Montalembert speaks of ''the Keltic Church," 
 but tells us that he means the Irish. But he might 
 have meant the Britons or the Scotch, as these also 
 were Kelts. The term "Kelt" or "Keltic" is a 
 generic term, covering the British, the Irish and the 
 Scotch. 
 
 It was the Keltic Scots (or Scotch-Irish) who did 
 such noble and extensive work for the conversion of 
 the English. But the Britons, who were kinsmen of 
 the Scots and Irish, did nothing whatever for the 
 conversion of the English. They held entirely aloof 
 from the English Church for more than 500 years 
 as is confirmed by all competent historians. I will 
 give you a brief symposium of some of our best 
 modern writers on the subjects in question: — The 
 following are from William Hunt's "History of the 
 English Church from its Foundation to the Norman 
 Conquest : ' ' 
 
 "The English first received the Gospel directly from 
 Rome, and though men of another race (The Scots) 
 for a time carried on the work begun by the Roman 
 missionaries, our forefathers owed their evangeliza- 
 
 [76] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 tion to the apostolic zeal of the greatest of the Popes.*' 
 (Chap II., p. 16). Again, **From the British Church 
 no help came, and it had no share either in the founda- 
 tion or development of the English Church." (Chap. 
 III., p. 38). ''It may perhaps be as well to repeat 
 the warning that we must not be led by any vague 
 expression, such as 'the Keltic Church' to confuse 
 the Scots and the Britons. The British Church con- 
 tributed nothing to the evangelization of the Eng- 
 lish people. It has been said, "The Roman planted, 
 the Scot watered, the Briton did nothing." (Chap. 
 IV, p. 74.) 
 
 The late Bishop of Gibraltar and former Professor 
 of Ecclesiastical History in King's College, London, 
 W. E. Colins, in his Lectures on "The Beginnings of 
 English Christianity," declares, "That the British 
 Christians left the English people severely alone was 
 as much the result of a narrow conception of their 
 faith as of any deliberate malice. But the fact must 
 be clearly recognized. . . . The English Church de- 
 rived from the first much of her best life from the 
 spiritual sons of the abbots of lona. But to trace 
 back the origin of that Church to the older British 
 Christianity, or to derive her life from it in any de- 
 gree whatever, is to falsify history. . . . The British 
 Church is not the mother of the English, but an elder 
 sister; and at first, a very unfriendly one. The real 
 connection between them is not a thing of the sixth 
 century, or the seventh or the eighth, but of later 
 days; of the centuries from the eleventh to the thir- 
 teenth. They are indeed knit together into one, but by 
 
 [76] 
 
THE COMING OF AUGUSTINE 
 
 the bonds of union, not of birth ; for the older British 
 Church was by degrees merged in the English, as the 
 older British kingdoms were." (*'The Beginnings of 
 English Christianity." pp. 97-98.) 
 
 I have quoted so often from William Bright 's 
 ** Chapters in Early English Church History" that 
 I will give you a quotation from one of his numerous 
 lesser works, ''Way Marks in Church History:" 
 **We do not know of a single case in which the British 
 Church as such did anything for the conversion of 
 the English. . . . We may confidently say with the 
 late Professor Freeman, *It is contrary to all his- 
 torical fact to speak of the ancient British Church as 
 something . . . out of which the Church of England 
 grew. ' It is equally unhistorical to speak of the Welsh 
 Episcopate as the 'fountain' of the English. There 
 is, we may say it with thankfulness, a real continuity 
 between the British and the English Church; but it 
 consists in this, that by slow degrees — by a complex 
 process which extended through some five centuries, 
 the English Church absorbed the British into one 
 body; the older and smaller stream flowed into the 
 younger and larger, and became a veritable and in- 
 separable part of it." ("Waymarks," pp. 237-299.) 
 
 Bishop Collins, in an essay on "England before the 
 Kef ormation, ' ' declares : "It need hardly be said that 
 the illusive dream must be once for all abandoned 
 which would regard 'the British Church' as one of 
 transcendant purity, directly apostolical in origin, 
 Scriptural in doctrine and free from Papal corrup- 
 tion, and which holds that this pure Church was con- 
 
 [77] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 fronted, displaced and superseded by a corrupt and 
 popish organization. There can be no real question 
 that the Christianity which the English received from 
 the continent of Europe was far nobler than that 
 which the Britons intentionally withheld from them. ' ' 
 (''The Church Past and Present," p. 105.) 
 
 The Rev. J. H. Maude, in "The Foundations of the 
 English Church," says, "One thing is certain, that 
 British Christianity never effected, or attempted to 
 effect anything whatever towards the conversion of 
 the conquering English." . . . (p. 17.) 
 
 Rev. M. W. Patterson, in his "History of the 
 Church of England," says, "The British Church in 
 England contributed nothing directly towards the 
 evangelization of the Anglo-Saxons." 
 
 Dr. Alfred Plummer, in his very recent work on 
 "The Churches in Britain before A. D. 1000," says, 
 * ' It seems right to add here a word of caution against 
 the common confusion between the British Church 
 and the English Church. This mistake is still made, 
 even by persons who undertake to instruct others 
 and therefore are specially bound to endeavor to be 
 accurate ; and this particular inaccuracy is not a mere 
 slip, which any one might pardonably make, but a 
 rather serious error, which it is quite easy to avoid. 
 In the first ten centuries of the Christian era, the 
 British Church and the English Church were quite 
 distinct, and had very little to do with one another, 
 although at a much later date they became united. 
 . . . We must carefully avoid using the expression 
 'English Church' of anything that existed earlier 
 than 597." (Vol. I., pp. 16-7.) 
 
 r78] 
 
Ill 
 
 The Coming of Aidan and the Scotch-Irish Mission 
 TO THE English. 
 
 Both the kingdom and the Church of Northumbria 
 had come to grief when King Edwin fell on the fatal 
 field of Heathfield and Bishop Paulinus hastily de- 
 serted his scattered flock, leaving only the faithful 
 Deacon James to withstand the ravages of the heathen. 
 The year that followed Edwin's death might well be 
 called 'Hhe Hateful Year "—'' hateful to all good 
 men" is the phrase of Bede. Other misfortunes also 
 befell in that same disastrous year. For a short time 
 the kingdom was again divided into two, and came 
 under the misrule of two scions of the old line of 
 Ethelf rid — Osric in Deira and Eanfrid in Bernicia. 
 Both of these became apostates from Christianity, 
 repudiating their baptism to curry favor with Penda, 
 King of Mercia, and with their own pagan followers. 
 Both of them were soon slain by the furious British 
 King, Cadwallon, the last hero of the Britons. 
 
 But a brighter day and many happy years came 
 to State and Church when the younger brother of 
 Eanfrid and nephew, on his mother's side, of Edwin, 
 proved himself a patriotic and Christian prince by 
 boldly confronting the oppressors of his country with 
 *'an army small in numbers, but fortified by faith in 
 Christ." Oswald assembled his army on a hill aus- 
 piciously known as ' ' Heavenfield. " "The British 
 
 [79] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 King Cadwallon," we are told, "though a Christian, 
 had allied himself with Penda, the heathen King of 
 Mercia, whom he exceeded in ferocity. The two allies 
 thought to destroy the Northumbrian kingdom, Cad- 
 wallon because it was English, Penda because it was 
 Christian, and both of them because they coveted the 
 Northumberland territory." The night before the 
 battle Oswald, who in his youth had been an exile at 
 lona and had become a Christian there, dreamed that 
 its founder, St. Columba, appeared to him in shining 
 robe, shielding the English army and promising vic- 
 tory to them. With this good omen, the next morning 
 the King drew up his forces, and planting high on 
 Heavenfield a wooden cross as the standard for his 
 men, he aroused their faith and courage by a stirring 
 appeal, — **Let us all kneel," he cried, **and join in 
 prayer to the Almighty, the living and true Lord, 
 that of His mercy He will defend us from our proud 
 and cruel foe, for He knoweth that the cause for 
 which we fight is just." Fresh from their prayers 
 his army charged the superior numbers of the enemy 
 with such an impulse and pressed them so hard, that 
 the British, who had hitherto counted themselves in- 
 vincible, gave way, were utterly routed and destroyed. 
 The terrible Cadwallon himself fled from the field 
 only to be overtaken and slain. A little chapel, called 
 **St. Oswald's," now marks the supposed spot where 
 the King set up his cross — the first erected in Ber- 
 nicia. ** Heavenfield, " it was long said, "had fully 
 made up for Heathfield." Heaven smiled once more 
 upon a reunited Northumbria under the wise and 
 
 [80] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 righteous rule of Oswald, who was revered as a saint 
 for centuries through all the north country. And, 
 indeed, he proved himself worthy of this name by his 
 godly and Christian life, and by his devoted public 
 and personal services in restoring the Church to his 
 people. It was not to Paulinus, however, the pioneer 
 missionary in the field, that Oswald turned for help, 
 neither to Canterbury nor Rome. Few Roman mis- 
 sionaries were now left in England. Fresh blood was 
 needed sorely, and a more ardent and unconquerable 
 missionary zeal than England had yet seen. For- 
 tunately Oswald knew where to find it. He turned 
 to his beloved lona, where, as a young refugee his 
 own Christian faith had been kindled. The fifth abbot 
 in succession from St. Columba was Seghine now 
 presiding there — presiding even over the bishops at- 
 tached to the community, though himself a presbyter — 
 for that was long the Irish use in their monasteries. 
 It was this very unusual use — the supreme control 
 of the abbot which Columba established in Scotland; 
 where there were still no Diocesan bishops, but merely 
 bishops attached to the monasteries to ordain and 
 perform functions peculiar to the Episcopal office. 
 Such a bishop Seghine sent to Oswald, but the first 
 one sent was a great failure, and was **sent back 
 empty." Like Augustine's first band of monks, he 
 was soon ready to turn back from such a forlorn hope. 
 He wanted to go home. Bede has kindly drawn a 
 veil over this man's name. He was not worth men- 
 tioning, but later tradition has called him Corman. 
 I will give you Bede's account, which has a whole- 
 
 [81] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 some lesson for the young clergyman in his first mis- 
 sionary field : ' ' It is reported that when King Oswald 
 had asked a bishop of the Scots to administer the 
 word of faith to him and his nation, there was first 
 sent to him another man of more austere disposition, 
 who, meeting with no success and being unregarded 
 by the English people, returned home, and, in an 
 assembly of the elders, reported that he had not been 
 able to do any good to the nation he had been sent 
 to preach to, because they were uncivilized men and 
 of a stubborn and barbarous disposition. The elders, 
 as it is testified, in a great council seriously debated 
 what was to be done, being desirous that the nation 
 should receive the salvation it demanded, and griev- 
 ing that they had not received the preacher sent to 
 them. Then said Aidan, who was also present in 
 the council, to the priest then spoken of, "I am of 
 opinion, brother, that you were more severe to your 
 unlearned hearers than you ought to have been, and 
 did not at first, conformably to the Apostolic rule, 
 give them the milk of more easy doctrine, till being 
 by degrees nourished with the Word of God, they 
 should be capable of greater perfection, and be 
 able to practice God's sublimer precepts. Having 
 heard these words, all present began diligently to 
 weigh what he had said, and presently concluded that 
 he (Aidan) deserved to be made a bishop, and ought 
 to be sent to instruct the incredulous and unlearned, 
 since he was found to be endued with singular dis- 
 cretion, which is the mother of other virtues; and 
 accordingly being ordained, they sent him to their 
 
 [82] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 friend, King Oswald, to preach; and he, as time 
 proved, afterwards appeared to possess all other vir- 
 tues, as well as the discretion for which he was be- 
 fore remarkable.'* 
 
 It was thus that, thirty years after Augustine's 
 death, in the year 635, little lona stepped in where 
 mighty Rome had nearly failed. With the coming 
 of Aidan began the Golden Age of saintly self-devo- 
 tion and evangelistic fervor which was to do so 
 much to win England to Christ. While we should 
 not under-rate the first noble impulse to England's 
 conversion which came straight from Gregory the 
 Great and from Rome, nor the organizing and uni- 
 fying power of that great Church, then the best in 
 the world, which ultimately welded together into 
 one the separate and scattered forces at work, it is 
 hard to overestimate the splendid services of the 
 Scottish saints who were then altogether independ- 
 ent of the Roman mission and a noble example to it. 
 Nor is the secret of their wonderful success hard to 
 find. It was the power of their simple self-sacrific- 
 ing lives and of their fervid and untiring zeal in 
 preaching to others the Gospel which they embodied 
 in their own Apostolic lives. In his ** Monks of the 
 West," the liberal Roman Catholic writer, Mon- 
 talembert, declares of this period: ''What is dis- 
 tinctly visible is the influence of Keltic priests and 
 missionaries everywhere replacing and seconding 
 Roman missionaries, and reaching districts which 
 their predecessors had never been able to enter. The 
 stream of the Divine Word thus extended itself from 
 
 [83] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 North to South, and its slow but certain course 
 reached in succession all the people of the Hep- 
 tarchy. ... As to the two Northumbrian kingdoms 
 and those of Essex and Mercia, which comprehended 
 in themselves more than two-thirds of the territory 
 occupied by the German conquerors, these four 
 countries owed their first conversions exclusively 
 to the peaceful invasion of the Keltic monks, but 
 who, the first obstacles once surmounted, showed 
 much more perseverance and gained much more suc- 
 cess. ' ' 
 
 From the bleak and barren Island of the North- 
 west came Aidan to breathe a warmth and fructifying 
 life into what was spiritually a "wilderness," mak 
 ing the "desert to rejoice and blossom as the rose," 
 — breathing the very spirit of the living God into the 
 "dry bones" of the Northumberland Church until 
 they "stood up a great army." He chose for the 
 new kind of work which he inaugurated a new 
 centre more congenial to his own taste and task. 
 It was not at York, the seat of the Roman Mission 
 of Paulinus, but at a little island like his dear lona 
 that he established himself and his monastery mod- 
 elled after the simple but mighty one from which 
 he had come. At Lindisfarne, known later as the 
 "Holy Isle," he found the retreat for prayer and 
 study so grateful to the Scotch-Irish monks, and at 
 the same time a place very close to the royal resi- 
 dence at Bamborough of Oswald, henceforth his 
 king and beloved friend and fellow-laborer in the 
 Gospel. This was no place, indeed, to found a great 
 
 [84] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 Cathedral and administrative centre of a well-organ- 
 ized Diocese ; and later the See was removed in 883 
 to Chester-le-Street, and in 995 to glorious Durham. 
 But the time for that was not yet. Lindisfarne, like 
 Mont St. Michel off the coast of France, was joined 
 to the mainland at low tide by two miles of wet 
 sand. It suited well Aidan's love of retirement and 
 study and the purposes of his episcopal monastery, 
 of which he was both Abbot and Bishop, — and which 
 he meant to make the centre of his missionary work, 
 and also a training-school for future missionaries. 
 Here he began, almost at once, to gather a class of 
 twelve English lads, and to train a succession of 
 native horn devoted missionaries and saints, who came 
 ere long to rival in England the Ionian monks. Out 
 of this school came Eata, his own successor at Lin- 
 disfarne, the two famous brothers, Chadd and Cedd, 
 the evangelists of Southern England ; and Wilfrid, 
 the most famous of Northern churchmen and the 
 evangelist of Sussex. 
 
 We may pause here a moment to notice that, about 
 the time when Aidan's Northern School was 
 founded, we begin to hear for the first time of a 
 native-horn clergy in the South. ''Evidences are not 
 wanting," says William Hunt, ''that the efforts 
 made at Canterbury and at Dunwich to train up a 
 native clergy were bringing forth good results. The 
 first bishop of English race, a Kentishman named 
 Ithamar, was consecrated by Honorius to the See 
 of Rochester in 644, and was not inferior to his pre- 
 decessors either in holiness of life or learning." 
 
 [85] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 ''Again, in 647 Honorius consecrated Thomas from 
 Ely to succeed his former master Felix as Bishop of 
 the East Anglians, and, on his death, another Eng- 
 lishman, Berchgils, a native of Kent. . . . And, on 
 March 26th, 655, the first English Archbishop, a West 
 Saxon named Frithonas was consecrated by Ithamar 
 to the See of Canterbury, and took the name of 
 Deus Dedit." To return to our narrative of Aidan's 
 achievements, until he could educate out of his 
 English boys a native clergy, he had no lack of 
 clergy for immediate use. Irish and Scotch monks 
 vrere only too eager to join him in large numbers. 
 Devotion, study and cultivation of the ground was 
 the work of these farmer-monks while on the island ; 
 but they accompanied or followed their itinerant 
 abbot-bishop on his extensive and untiring mission- 
 ary tours afoot through a vast region. Until he had 
 learned to speak English himself Aidan had need of 
 an interpreter, and the King did not disdain to dis- 
 charge frequently this humble office in person. 
 King and Bishop often journeyed together on foot 
 through the country, the Bishop preaching and the 
 King interpreting to his people the message of the 
 Gospel. It was a rare sort of partnership in any 
 age or country, and as beautiful and effective as it 
 was rare. Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel and 
 Joshua, the son of Jozadak, did not work together 
 more harmoniously in building the House of the 
 Lord, nor Moses and Aaron as the joint-leaders of 
 the Israelites through the wilderness, than Oswald 
 and Aidan in evangelizing the Northumbrian folk. 
 
 [86] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 The King, it has been said, was as determined to 
 erect the cross in the hearts of his people as to plant 
 it on the hill of Heavenfield. He gave generously 
 also of money and lands for churches, monasteries 
 and schools throughout his realm. In all Bernicia, 
 we are told, there was not a single church-building 
 when Aidan came, and two only are mentioned as 
 surviving in more favored Deira. Many were now 
 built — simple structures, no doubt of wood thatched 
 with rushes, which served chiefly as mission-stations, 
 for parish-churches were not yet. These were served 
 mostly by travelling monks, or were connected with 
 monasteries, which sprang up here and there as new 
 centres of study and devotion and training schools 
 for the young and future evangelists. In this way, 
 while the mission at Canterbury gradually dwindled 
 for lack of laborers, the Scotic mission grew apace, 
 and was soon ready to put forth vigorous ojffshoots 
 in other Kingdoms. The main secret of its success 
 was undoubtedly the beautiful character and win- 
 ning personality of St. Aidan. Although he had 
 come to Northumbria without asking or receiving 
 any sanction whatever from either Canterbury or 
 Kome, and although he adhered strictly to the Scotic 
 uses of lona, to which the Roman ecclesiastics ob- 
 jected so strenuously, his lovely disposition and 
 character were such as to effectually disarm their 
 hostility and command their admiration. Bede, who 
 was almost a bigot for the Roman use and severely 
 critical of the Scotic, never questions the validity 
 of Aidants orders nor the Catholicity of his religion 
 
 [87] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 in things essential. He never tires of singing the 
 praises of a character so singularly free from fault 
 and so winsome to all who knew him. He tells us 
 also that Aidan was revered by Archbishop Honor- 
 ius of Canterbury and by Bishop Felix of East 
 Anglia. The late Professor Bright, of Oxford, in his 
 ''Early English Church History," has welded to- 
 gether very effectively the various passages of Bede 
 which bear upon the character of Aidan, and I can- 
 not do better than to give you some of these, '' 'A 
 man, * he begins, ' of the utmost gentleness, piety and 
 moderation ; ' and in subsequent passages he tells us 
 that 'Aidan was earnest in promoting peace and 
 charity, purity and humility, was superior to anger 
 and avarice, despised pride and vain glory, \vas 
 a conspicuous example of entire unworldliness, 
 strictly temperate in all his habits, sedulous in study 
 and devotion, full of tenderness for all sufferers, and 
 of righteous sternness towards powerful offenders;' 
 that he 'took pains to fulfil diligently the works of 
 faith, piety and love, according to the usual man- 
 ner of all holy men,' and in a word to 'omit not one 
 of the duties prescribed in the evangelical, apostolic, 
 and prophetic Scriptures, but to perform them to 
 the utmost of his power.' . . . Occasionally Aidan 
 would retire for devotional solitude to the chief 
 islet of the Fame group lying off Bamborough, on 
 which in Bede's time 'it was usual to point out the 
 spot where he was wont to sit alone.' We find also 
 that he brought in the practice of fasting on all 
 Wednesdays and Fridays until 3 p. m., except dur- 
 
 [88] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 ing *the fifty days of Easter.' In his actual mission 
 work he travelled on foot, unless compelled by nec- 
 essity to ride. This habit of walking enabled him 
 easily to enter into conversation with any one whom 
 he met, rich or poor, — to win him over if a heathen, 
 to encourage and exhort him if a believer. While 
 he and his companions travelled they used 'to medi- 
 tate on Texts of Scripture, or recite Psalms;' 'this 
 was their daily work.'. . . In his dealings with the 
 rich Aidan showed his superiority to 'fear or 
 favor;' he never witheld a rebuke deserved by mis- 
 doings of theirs, but always administered it with 
 the authority befitting a bishop. . . . On the other 
 hand, if a rich man offered him money it went 
 promptly to the poor, whose sufferings were ever in 
 the thought of this true 'cherisher of the needy and 
 father of the wretched.' 
 
 One thing alone Bede could not approve in Aidan, 
 — the inevitable Keltic error about the Pashal reck- 
 oning. . . . 'His keeping the Pasch out of its time 
 I do not approve of nor commend. But this I do 
 approve of, that what he kept in thought, rever- 
 enced, and preached in the celebration of his Paschal 
 festival, was just what we do, that is, the redemption 
 of mankind through the Passion, Resurrection and 
 Ascension into heaven of the Mediator between God 
 and man, the man Christ Jesus.' " 
 
 The good King Oswald, like his predecessor 
 Edwin, had his "Heathfield" too, and after a reign 
 of only eight glorious years, fell in battle with the 
 same strenuous pagan, Penda of Marcia, August 5th, 
 
 [89] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 642, at the age of thirty-eight. The battle was 
 fought at Maserfield near the town in Shropshire 
 which still commemorates Oswald's name, ** Oswes- 
 try." His dying words for his men passed into a 
 proverb, *'0 God, have mercy on the souls!' said 
 Oswald falling to the ground. His head severed 
 from the body, was recovered at Lindisfarne and 
 removed in 875, within the coffin of St. Cuthbert 
 when the monks abandoned the island before the 
 ferocity of the Danes. William of Malmsbury re- 
 lates that when the coffin of St. Cuthbert was opened 
 in Durham in 1104 **the head of Oswald, king and 
 martyr, was found between Cuthbert 's arms." It 
 was seen there again in the present century, accord- 
 ing to William Hunt's recent history. The late 
 Bishop of Durham, Dr. Lightfoot in his "Leaders 
 in the Northern Church," has an historical sermon 
 on St. Oswald from the text, "Like unto him was 
 there no king before him, that turned to the Lord 
 with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with 
 all his might." After drawing a striking parallel 
 between Oswald and the young King of Judah, 
 Josiah, he quotes the following words from the 
 book of Ecclesiasticus, merely changing the name of 
 Josiah to Oswald: — "The remembrance of Oswald 
 is sweet as honey in all mouths, and as music in a 
 banquet of wine. He behaved himself uprightly in 
 the conversation of the people, and took away the 
 abominations of idolatory. He directed his heart 
 unto the Lord, and in the time of the ungodly he 
 established the worship of God." 
 
 [90] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 Christianity was now too deep-rooted in North- 
 umbria to be plucked up by Penda, nor was he 
 successful in conquering the country. He laid siege, 
 indeed to Bamborough, but did not succeed in tak- 
 ing it, and shortly retired to other mischief else- 
 where. Then the kingdom was again divided. A 
 brother of Oswald named Oswy ruled in Bernicia, 
 with Eanfleda, daughter of Edwin and grand- 
 daughter of Ethelbert, for his queen. The new 
 King of Deira was Oswin, described by Bede as the 
 ideal of kingly beauty and virtue, who became very 
 dear to Aidan for his resemblance in character to 
 Oswald. The closing part of Bede's panegyric is as 
 follows : ' ^ The King Oswin was comely and tall ; 
 pleasant of speech and courteous in manner; open 
 of hand to all, whether noble or not noble. Thus it 
 came about that all men loved him for his royal 
 dignity of mind and look and character; and men, 
 even the most noble, flocked to his service from 
 other provinces. Among his great qualities of valor 
 and moderation and peculiar sweetness, greatest of 
 all was his humility." 
 
 But Oswin, as Aidan said of him, was 'Hoo good 
 for this world," and it was not long before he joined 
 Oswald in a better world. He was cruelly betrayed 
 and murdered by an assassin employed by Oswy of 
 Bernicia. The crime of the one King, and the un- 
 timely end of the other, so full of promise, were 
 too much for Aidan, and shortened his days. In the 
 closing part of his espiscopate he took great pleasure 
 in the founding of a nunnery at Hartlepool by 
 
 [91] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 the saintly Hilda, great-niece of King Edwin, and in 
 helping the abbess, who was of a kindred mind, to 
 rule well the new religious house. Twelve days 
 after the death of Oswin, while visiting at the 
 King's country house near Bamborough, Aidan was 
 seized suddenly with mortal sickness; and, before 
 he could be moved to his bed-room in the villa, he 
 expired on the ground under an awning hastily set 
 up close to the church, his head resting against a post. 
 He died in the seventeenth year of his episcopate, 
 the last day of the month of August, 651. 
 
 It is related that an English shepherd-boy, keep- 
 ing watch over his flock by night on the Lammer- 
 moor hills, while his comrades slept, saw a vision of 
 angels bearing a soul to heaven; and a few days 
 after learned that it was at this hour that God took 
 to Himself the saintly soul of Aidan, first bishop of 
 Lindisfarne. The shepherd-boy was Cuthbert, and 
 the vision determined his future life. He devoted 
 himself to the service of God in the monastery of 
 Melrose, and later suceeded to Aidan 's See at Lin- 
 disfarne and to his work in Bernicia. 
 
 Lightfoot says, ''Augustine was the Apostle of 
 Kent, but Aidan was the Apostle of England." If 
 this statement be too strong, and I think it is, cer- 
 tainly the whole story of the making of the English 
 Church furnishes no lovelier character, no nobler 
 missionary service, far-reaching in its influence, than 
 those of the Scotic missionary and English bishop 
 rightly canonized by the Roman Church as ''Saint 
 Aidan.'' 
 
 [92] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 ''The history," says Bright, "of the Church in 
 Norihumhria during the larger part of the seventh 
 century is conspicuously the hackhone of the history 
 of the Church in England. It is striking to see how 
 the region which was first to come before St. 
 Gregory's thoughts in regard to an English mission, 
 and yet, for just thirty years was inaccessible to 
 missionary attempt, no sooner in any sense accepted 
 Christianity than it concentrated into itself the 
 chief interest of the great drama of national con- 
 version; this being due, no doubt, in part to the 
 relative scantiness of our information as to other 
 districts, but also largely to the force and impres- 
 siveness of the characters that walk the Northum- 
 brian stage" — I would add, — and to the rare his- 
 torian and biographer of Northumbria and its 
 heroes, the unrivaled Bede. 
 
 In magnifying, however, the winsome personality 
 of Aidan, and his glorious work for Northumbria 
 and for England, it is unnecessary, however, unfair, 
 and unhistoric, to belittle the earlier work of either 
 Augustine's seven laborious years in Kent or of 
 Paulinus's six untiring years in Northumbria. Ad- 
 mittedly, "Augustine was the Apostle of Kent," and 
 Paulinus was the Apostle of Northumbria in the 
 same sense, using the word "Apostle" in the sense 
 then current of Pioneer Missionary, the first in the 
 field, or Founder. And in that same sense, Augustine 
 was "the Apostle of England/' too, the first to bring 
 the Christian Gospel and Church to our heathen an- 
 cestors the English race. We know very little about 
 
 [93] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 the personality and character of this man; and what 
 we know is not exactly fascinating. Certainly he 
 had not the charm, the lovableness, the wisdom, nor 
 the success of Aidan as a winner of souls to God, or 
 of hearts to himself. But, none the less, he was 
 Aidan 's predecessor in the English field, as Paulinus 
 was also in the Northumbrian field. 
 
 Augustine, acting for and inspired by a greater 
 than himself, viz. Gregory, the Great Bishop of 
 Rome, did successfully lay a firm and lasting founda- 
 tion of the English Church. This Church, thus 
 founded, has outlived all the pecularities and eccen- 
 tricities of the Scotch-Irish missionaries, except their 
 intense personal and missionary religion, — which is 
 their greatest glory and their imperishable contribu- 
 tion to the cause and Church of Christ. We shall see 
 later that this invaluable contribution of theirs might 
 have been lost to the English Church without the sup- 
 port of the stronger and better organizing and cen- 
 tralizing and unifying genius of the then Roman 
 Church under one of the greatest of all its Bishops, 
 Gregory the Great. 
 
 The Christianizing influence of Aidan was not by 
 any means confined to the sixteen years of his episco- 
 pate. He did not live to see the largest results of 
 his own labors. His immediate successor as bishop 
 and abbot was Finan, a man of more Irish temper 
 and less winning ways than Aidan, but one who did 
 a faithful work. He replaced the very humble 
 church-building by one unpretentious but more suit- 
 able to the episcopal See, and constructed it in the 
 
 [94] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 Scotic fashion, not of stone, but entirely of hewn oak, 
 with a covering of reeds. He put some oak also into 
 his stubborn refusal to comply with those who began 
 to demand his compliance with the Roman Easter. 
 The thirteen years that followed Aidan's death wit- 
 nessed a vast enlargement of his work throughout 
 Northumbria, its extension south of the Humber, and 
 into the vast regions of the midlands. It soon found 
 lodgment within the very household of Penda him- 
 self, and thence pervaded his realm, the last strong- 
 hold of heathenism. Mercia comprised all the mid- 
 land part of Britain, having Northumbria on the 
 north, Wessex and Sussex on the south, Wales on the 
 west, and east Anglia on the east. 
 
 The Matrimonial method of propagating the faith 
 was still the English fashion, and broke out again 
 in fresh quarters. In the case now to be reported 
 a double marriage took place in two very important 
 families. Oswy, now King of reunited Northumbria, 
 married his son to Penda 's daughter, and his daugh- 
 ter Alchfleda to Peada, Penda 's son, "an excellent 
 youth," on the usual condition that she would have 
 the right to retain her own religion. Peada, now 
 King of the Middle Angles, was prepared to go fur- 
 ther, and declared, **I will be a Christian, whether 
 I obtain the maiden or not" — a resolution which I 
 commend highly to the young men before me. Peada 
 was accordingly baptized, with his attendants, and 
 took home with him a band of Christian monks from 
 Aidan's school. The four learned and zealous 
 priests who returned with him to his own kingdom 
 
 [95] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 to propagate his new faith were Diuma, a Scot, and 
 three Englishmen, natives of Northumbria, Cedd, 
 Adda and Betti. They had great success among the 
 middle Anglians, and won many converts of all 
 classes. Even Penda began at last to relent in his 
 inflexible hostility, and allowed missionaries in his 
 own Mercia, declaring that his main objection was 
 not to true Christians, but false ones — ''The mean 
 wretches," he called them, "who have put their 
 faith in this new God, and then will not trouble 
 themselves to obey Him" — an old and ever new 
 stumbling block to the progress of Christ's Gospel. 
 
 The conversion of the East Saxons soon followed, 
 and Essex, from which Mellitus, the Roman bishop 
 of London, had been rudely expelled, now welcomed 
 the Scotic missionaries. Oswy of Northumbria tried 
 to atone for his sin in procuring the death of his 
 rival Oswin by doing all he could for the cause of 
 Christianity. The then King of the East Saxons — 
 another Sigbert — was a close friend of Oswy's and 
 a frequent visitor at his court, where Oswy used his 
 influence to make him a Christian. Sigbert became 
 a convert, and was baptized by Bishop Finan, and 
 asked for missionaries to convert his people. These 
 were now in such demand from various quarters 
 that the supply at Lindisfarne began to run short. 
 
 So Finan transferred Cedd to Essex, and gave him 
 another monk to help him. They had such encour- 
 aging success that Finan, in conjunction with two 
 other Scottish bishops, consecrated Cedd bishop of 
 the East Saxons in 654. Bede, with all his prejudice 
 
 [96] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 against the peculiarities of the Scotic Church, evi- 
 dently found no shadow of a flaw in the validity 
 of their espiscopal orders. His language here is worth* 
 quoting : — " Finan, on learning how the work of the 
 Gospel prospered with Cedd, made him bishop, hav- 
 ing called in two other bishops to assist him in the 
 ordination. Cedd, having received the degree of 
 the episcopate, returned to his province, and ful- 
 filling with greater authority the work which he 
 had begun, made churches in different places, or- 
 daining priests and deacons to assist him in the 
 work of faith." It has been objected that it was the 
 usual custom of the Scots for only one bishop to 
 consecrate to the episcopate. In this case, at least, 
 three are expressly mentioned, and we have already 
 seen that the Roman missionaries in England had 
 several times, and with papal sanction, consecrated 
 to the Episcopal office and to the archbishopric by 
 the hands of a single bishop. Spite of the Nicene de- 
 cree that such consecrations should be by not less 
 than three bishops, consecration by a single bishop 
 was not considered invalid. Gregory had expressly 
 permitted it to Augustine until he should have three 
 or four bishops in England to unite with him. "As 
 a matter of fact in England Augustine consecrated 
 the three bishops who afterwards succeeded him at 
 Canterbury, Lawrence, Mellitus and Justus without 
 assistants, — Justus consecrated Paulinus, Paulinus 
 consecrated Honorius the fifth Archbishop, and 
 Ithamar consecrated Deusdedit the sixth Archbishop 
 also, without assistants, not to mention other cases, 
 
 [97] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 such as the early consecrations of Theodore.*' (J. H. 
 Mande.) 
 
 There is no evidence that Cedd undertook to es- 
 tablish his own Episcopal seat at London, the orig- 
 inal See, or even that he had any definite and official 
 See. He appears to have resided mostly with his 
 monks attached to two main monasteries and centres 
 of missionary work — the one at a place which Bede 
 calls Ythanceaster, and the other at Tilbury. He is 
 also reported to have resorted frequently to Deira 
 on preaching tours, and to have received from the 
 King the site of a monastery which he founded at 
 Lastingham, then a wild and weird spot amidst *Hhe 
 haunts of robbers and the lairs of wild beasts rather 
 than the dwellings of men." This subsequently be- 
 came a favorite resort of Cedd, who seems to have 
 imbibed the Scotic love of retirement and to have 
 divided his time between his new monastery here 
 and his episcopal work in Essex. In the faithful 
 discharge of the latter we find one of the earliest 
 cases in Englamd of the exercise of episcopal severity 
 which went to the extreme point of excommunica- 
 tion. The questions of Marriage and Divorce 
 troubled the Church then as now, and called for 
 extreme methods. Cedd had excommunicated one 
 of Sigbert's nobles and kinsmen for adhering to an 
 unlawful marriage. He was cut off from social in- 
 tercourse with all churchmen. The King, however, 
 ventured to accept an invitation to the house of the 
 offender. Returning from a dinner party there, he 
 met the irate bishop, leaped in terror from his horse, 
 
 [98] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 knelt and craved the bishop's forgiveness. But the 
 inflexible prelate, touching the royal transgressor 
 with a stick that he held in his hand, predicted the 
 King's death in the house from which he had just 
 come. And indeed this man, so recently his host, 
 brought about shortly the murder of Sigbert in 
 revenge for what he considered the craven conduct 
 on the part of the King. But Sigbert 's untimely 
 death did not, as in many previous cases, check the 
 progress of Christianity in the kingdom. It went 
 steadily forward under his successor. 
 
 But while Cedd was pursuing his mission of peace 
 in Essex, Penda the irrepressible, was at his old 
 tricks again, and was on the war-path for the last 
 time. Already he had recently invaded East Anglia, 
 slain its Christian King Anna, and set up Anna's 
 unworthy brother Ethelhere as the conqueror's 
 vassal, using him also as an ally for another in- 
 vasion of Northumbria. Spite of the intermarriages 
 between Oswy's family and Penda 's, spite of Oswy's 
 efforts for peace, his offers of priceless gifts and of 
 his own son as hostage, nothing availed to satisfy 
 Penda 's passion for overrunning and annihilating 
 the Northumbrians. Then Oswy braced himself up 
 for a final conflict which could no longer be averted, 
 crying out, ''If the pagan will not accept our gifts, 
 let us offer them to Him who will, the Lord our 
 God." Then he made a vow that if God would give 
 him victory over his enemies, he would dedicate 
 to the monastic life his little girl Elfled, and would 
 give the lands for the building of no less than twelve 
 
 [99] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 monasteries. With this doubtful act of piety Oswy 
 prepared to meet Penda and his allies, including 
 again princes of the Britons, of the Picts also, and 
 the new renegade Christian ally, Ethelhere of Essex. 
 They came on, swarming like locusts, thirty legions 
 in all, each under its own chief. The two unequal 
 armies met at Winwidfield, and there Penda, who 
 in twenty-two years had killed five important kings, 
 all Christians and all Angles, made the last stand 
 for heathenism in England until the coming of the 
 Danes. His vast army was swept utterly away by 
 the inferior force under Oswy. ''The stars in their 
 courses," and the waters in their wrath fought 
 against the heathen hosts. The most formidable foe 
 of Northumbria and of Christianity was smitten 
 down to rise no more, and with him fell most of his 
 chieftains. So perished on that day the enemies of 
 the Lord by the waters of the Winwaed. Just as the 
 river of Kishon swept away the forces of Sisera, so 
 the Winwaed waters, we are told, swollen into a flood 
 by recent rains, swept away the Mercians, swept 
 away ''many more in their flight than the sword had 
 destroyed while fighting. ' ' The battle of Wingfield, as 
 it was generally called, November 15th, 655, is called 
 by Freeman "a turning-point in the history of our 
 island." With the fall of Penda came the indepen- 
 dence of Northumbria. ' ' With Penda, ' ' says Milman, 
 "fell Paganism." 
 
 Oswy the Conqueror now redoubled his efforts for 
 the advancement of the victorious faith, not only 
 in his now secure Kingdom, but also in that of the 
 
 [100] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 fallen Penda, Mercia, which came for some time un- 
 der his control as overlord. He kept strictly the vow 
 made before the battle of Wingfield. Of the twelve 
 monasteries which he founded, six were located in 
 Bernicia, and the other six in Deira — ''wherein 
 earthly warfare should cease, and in which there 
 should be a perpetual residence and subsistence for 
 monks to follow the warfare w^hich is spiritual, and 
 pray diligently for the peace of the nation." Os- 
 wy's daughter Elfled was duly given up to Hilda 
 at Hartlepool to become ''first a learner and then a 
 teacher of the monastic life." 
 
 Before we pass out of Northumbria to note the 
 establishment of Christianity in Mercia, we may well 
 pause for a moment to contemplate the character and 
 work of that gracious Lady Hilda, Abbess first of 
 Hartlepool and afterwards of far-famed Whitby Ab- 
 bey. We have already noticed the remarkable influ- 
 ence exerted by Christian women who married kings 
 of heathen realms. But single women also, conse- 
 crated to perpetual virginity, played no insignificant 
 part in the Christian work of our ancestors. The 
 most conspicuous instance of this was St. Hilda who 
 came of the royal family of Northumbria, and spent 
 her early life at court, but devoted the rest to minister- 
 ing to the poor, and especially to promoting the cause 
 of religious education. In this repsect her career was 
 one of the most illustrious of all the founders of the 
 English Church. Bishop Lightfoot does not hesi- 
 tate to rank her among the three most potent per- 
 sonages in the early Northumbrian Church — Oswald 
 
 [101] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 the King, Aidan the Bishop, and Hilda the Abbess. 
 He ranks her, indeed, ** among the chief makers of 
 England in the childhood of the English nation,'' 
 and says: — *'"With the tact and sympathy of a wo- 
 man, she united the sound judgment and self- 
 restraint of a man. The great and lowly alike were 
 drawn towards her. Kings and princes sought her 
 advice in the perplexities of statesmanship ; bishops 
 exchanged spiritual counsels with her. Monasteries 
 were then the sole depositories of knowledge, and 
 the sole schools of learning. The religious house 
 with which she was connected was twofold. There 
 was a side for women, and a side for men — an ar- 
 rangement not uncommon in those days. The chiv- 
 alry of their Christianity and of their race gave the 
 precedence to women. Hilda ruled over both. Her 
 house was a great training-school for the clergy. 
 Not less than five of her pupils became bishops of 
 important Sees — two of York, one of Dorchester, 
 one of "Worcester, and one of Hexham. This last 
 was the famous St. John of Beverley. What wonder 
 that all who came near her saluted her with the 
 endearing name of * Mother' — a title not yet, it 
 would seem, given by virtue of their office to Ab- 
 besses of religious houses, but specially accorded to 
 her, as we are told, by reason of her signal piety and 
 grace. She was indeed 'a Mother in Israel.' Nor 
 is it only as a school of theology, a nursery of clergy, 
 that her house demands our respect. Here English 
 literature was cradled. The earliest of English poets, 
 Caedmon received under Hilda the training and 
 
 [102] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 the inspiration which transformed him, like Amos 
 of old, from a simple cowherd into a prophet and 
 teacher of men.** 
 
 Let us now proceed to notice briefly the measures 
 taken for the conversion of the two other kingdoms 
 of the Heptarchy — Mercia and Sussex. Mercia had 
 now come under the authority of Oswy as Bret- 
 walda. He allowed his son-in-law Peada, son of 
 Penda, to continue as under-king of the Middle An- 
 glians in Southern Mercia. We have already seen 
 how the conversion of this part was successfully 
 begun by the four missionaries from Lindisfarne 
 who followed Peada thither at the time of his mar- 
 riage. This work went on prosperously until the 
 tragedy of Peada *s death, who was assassinated 
 with the probable connivance of his wife. Nor was 
 the cause of Christianity checked by this unhappy 
 affair, for all Mercia remained for three years longer 
 under Oswy*s personal rule. Then the Mercians rose 
 against Oswy, and regained their independence, 
 with a younger brother of Peada named Wulfhere 
 as King. The return to the old dynasty did not 
 affect the progress of Christianity, for as Bede, him- 
 self a Northumbrian, observes with characteristic 
 generosity **free and with a king of their own the 
 Mercians joyfully served Christ the true King.*' 
 Wulfhere was himself a Christian and a zealous 
 promotor of its progress during the sixteen years of 
 his reign, and thereby the rest of Mercia was success- 
 fully evangelized. One of Peada *s first mission- 
 aries, Diuma a Scotchman had already been conse- 
 [103] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 crated a bishop by Finan. Later he was succeeded 
 by another monk from Lindisfarne, Trumhere, an 
 Englishman. We are also told that a rich and noble 
 monk named Saxulf, about this time, built and be- 
 came first Abbot of a famous and influential mon- 
 astery for central England at Peterborough. Wulf- 
 here gradually extended his sway, and used his 
 power also to extend his religion with it, especially 
 in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, which he con- 
 quered. Both these new possessions passed to the 
 King of the South Saxons, Ethelwalch, who was per- 
 suaded to receive baptism, but it does not appear 
 to have had much effect upon Sussex. He either 
 would not, or could not gain any converts among his 
 own people. Sussex was last of all the English 
 kingdoms to receive the Gospel, and when they did 
 finally receive it, it came not from their next-door 
 neighbors at Canterbury, but from far-off North- 
 umbria. 
 
 The conversion of Sussex did not begin until 
 twenty years later, but we will take it out of its 
 chronological order in order to complete our survey 
 of Christianity in the several kingdoms of the Hep- 
 tarchy. This was one of the oldest of all the king- 
 doms, but was one of the smallest, and had long been 
 one of the most backward in coming forward, not only 
 in receiving the Gospel, but also in its national life. 
 Cut off by its impenetrable forests and marshes, it 
 had remained almost untouched by all that was go- 
 ing on in the rest of England, its people as barbar- 
 ous as when they first landed here. The king and 
 
 [104] 
 
THE COMING OF AIDAN 
 
 queen, indeed, were nominal Christians, and had 
 received into their realm a settlement of half a dozen 
 Irish monks with Dical as Abbot, but even the Irish 
 fire, which had kindled a flame in so many other 
 lands, seemed almost extinguished by the coldness 
 of the South Saxons. The monks had eimply settled 
 down in a monastery at Bosham to hold the fort 
 until better days should come. This was the forlorn 
 situation of Sussex spiritually when "the man and 
 the hour arrived again" — when one of the most 
 famous ecclesiastics of England, or Europe, himself 
 in evil case then, took refuge there in the year 681 
 from his enemies, who were many and mighty. We 
 shall hear more of the new-comer, for his career was 
 an eventful and stormy one which shook the whole 
 western Church. 
 
 He was a man of rare ability and varied accom- 
 plishments, trained in the school of Lindisfarne, but 
 an uncompromising advocate of Rome. He was a 
 native of Northumbria, and had been bishop there. 
 Indeed he had already held not a few of the high- 
 est ecclesiastical positions in England. In the inter- 
 vals between his various episcopates, his numerous 
 and extensive travels, his frequent fights, his im- 
 prisonments and flights, his ups and downs gen- 
 erally, Wilfrid of York once in a while proved him- 
 self a most devoted and effective missionary in a 
 most unpromising field. He had already attempted 
 the conversion of the ferocious Frisians. And now, 
 on the dreary coast of Sussex, this fallen prelate 
 of the North, himself in evil case, finds a field where 
 
 [105] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 none had gathered any harvest before him, and he 
 simply did the job. Some fifteen years before, he 
 had been wrecked on this same inhospitable coast, and 
 **the barbarous people had showed him no little un- 
 kindness" then, and he had barely escaped with 
 his life from these savage Saxons. Now he seizes 
 the opportunity to return good for evil, and to save 
 the lives as well as the souls of his former captors. It 
 has been well said of Wilfrid, that he was at his 
 best in adversity. Prosperity seemed to spoil him. 
 Thomas Fuller writes quaintly, **As it is observed of 
 nightingales, that they sing the sweetest when far- 
 thest from their nests, so this Wilfrid was most dili- 
 gent in God's service when at the greatest distance 
 from his own home.** You may have noticed, more 
 probably of some other man than of yourself, that he 
 was a better Christian elsewhere than in his own 
 home. Things were about at their worst in Sussex 
 when Wilfrid turned up this time. No rain had 
 fallen for three years, gaunt famine was stalking 
 through the land, and hunger was driving the people 
 to suicide. In parties of fifty, we are told, they 
 would join hands, and cast themselves headlong into 
 the sea to escape the pangs of hunger. The sea was 
 swarming with fish, but these silly folk had not wit 
 enough to catch any thing but a few eels in shallow 
 water. Wilfrid was a versatile man, and fisherman 
 enough to catch both fish and men. He soon showed 
 the dull Saxons the art of deep-sea fishing, — showed 
 them how to join together their little eel-nets into 
 a big drag-net, and thrust out into the sea for a 
 
 [106] 
 
THE COMING OF AID AN 
 
 draught worth having. The result was like that of 
 the Master's word on the Galilean Lake when they 
 had toiled all the night and taken nothing. 
 
 Three hundred fish at a catch the famishing 
 heathen hauled ashore, and Wilfrid was hailed as 
 their deliverer. ''By which good service," says 
 Bede, who knew how to make a story end well, **the 
 prelate turned their hearts powerfully to love him, 
 and they were the readier to listen hopefully to his 
 preaching about heavenly benefits, after they had 
 through his agency received temporal good." When 
 the drought broke up on the day that his first con- 
 verts received baptism, and there was abundance of 
 rain, that settled it for the conversion of the Saxons. 
 They hailed him as if he had been Elijah. *'And 
 so," says Bede, "having cast off their old supersti- 
 tions and renounced their idoltary, the heart and 
 flesh of the people rejoiced in turning to the living 
 God, understanding that He who is the true God 
 had enriched them by his heavenly grace with both 
 inward and outward blessings." The King rewarded 
 the Apostle of his people by bestowing upon him a 
 royal villa for his residence and with it a spacious 
 domain and all its belongings, the promontory of 
 Selsey, which he made a monastery and episcopal See, 
 which became the centre of a successful and per- 
 manent missionary work. It remained the See of 
 Sussex until the Norman Conquest, when it was 
 removed to Chichester, where it now is. We are told 
 of another act of Wilfrid's, which also shows him 
 again at his best. A part of the royal donation to 
 
 [107] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 him at Selsey consisted of two hundred and fifty- 
 persons **as bondsmen and bondswomen; he saved 
 them all by baptizing them from slavery to the 
 devil, and by granting them their liberty set them 
 free from the yoke of slavery to man." And Bede 
 closes this charming story with the words, *'For 
 five years Wilfrid exercised in these parts the office 
 of the episcopate, both by words and by deeds, de- 
 servedly honored by all.*' 
 
 [108] 
 
IV 
 
 The Coming-Together op the Roman and the 
 
 Scotch-Irish Missions to Make the 
 
 English Church 
 
 We have seen how the Christian religion had 
 reached the various Anglo-Saxon tribes in England, 
 and gradually overspread the whole Heptarchy, 
 from two separate sources far apart — from Rome 
 by way of Canterbury in the South, and from lona 
 by way of Lindisfarne in the North. These two 
 streams of evangelizing influence had hitherto 
 flowed apart, although occasionally coming close to- 
 gether in several of the kingdoms. Felix and Fursey 
 had worked peaceably side by side in East Anglia. 
 Aidan's gentle and fraternal spirit had prevented 
 friction between the Keltic and the Roman factions 
 in Northumbria, and under Finan his successor there 
 had been no outbreak. But Colman, the next bishop 
 of Lindisfarne, found the Roman party steadily 
 growing in power and prestige; and he himself, al- 
 though of saintly character, seems to have lacked 
 the conciliating spirit of his predecessors. In his 
 time the differences of ecclesiastical custom between 
 the Scottish and the Roman missionaries broke out 
 into open and stormy disputation. Their differences 
 appear to us very unimportant and even trivial, not 
 touching in the least the fundamentals of Catholic 
 
 [109] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 faith and Apostolic order. They were merely ques- 
 tions about the proper time of keeping Easter, about 
 the ceremonials of baptism and the shape of the 
 priestly tonsure — the Romans shaving only the 
 crown of the head in circular fashion, and the Scots 
 shaving across the forehead from ear to ear in the 
 shape of a crescent. It was the first Ritualistic con- 
 troversy in England, but not the last. In a recent 
 book on **The Foundations of the English Church,'* 
 by J. H. Maude, he says, * ' It was merely an uninten- 
 tional divergence of practice entirely due to absence 
 of communication. . . . The present age, however, 
 can hardly afford to assume any airs of superiority 
 in this matter, or to regard it as strange that small 
 matters of detail should excite strong feeling.'' The 
 distinguished Thomas Hodgkin, author of ''Italy 
 and Her Invaders," himself a Quaker, says naively, 
 ' ' There is a well-known law of Theological dynamics 
 that the bitterness of feeling between rival churches 
 is in inverse proportion to the magnitude of the 
 issues between them." 
 
 Underneath these superficial differences of prac- 
 tice, however, which might have been adjusted, there 
 lay a deeper issue and the real bone of contention — 
 the question of Roman dominance, or ecclesiastical 
 independence. Neither the old British Church of the 
 Roman province, nor the Keltic churches in Ireland 
 and Scotland had known any thing of the authority 
 of the Roman See in Great Britain — except, rather 
 vaguely, perhaps, the generally acknowledged Pri- 
 macy of that See in order of time and importance, and 
 
 [110] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 its recognition as the model church of the West. 
 There was a deference generally paid, too, to its 
 decisions on appeal in important matters of disci- 
 pline and its letters of advice (called "decretals"), 
 which had not yet become letters of command. But 
 the great distance of the Keltic churches from Rome 
 and the lack of communication, especially after the 
 retirement of the imperial government from Britain 
 and the chaos of the English invasions, must have 
 rendered any Papal letters to these parts practically 
 "dead letters." But with the coming of Augustine, 
 came plenty of letters from the Pope, live letters, 
 too, and very good ones, for which we owe him an 
 everlasting debt of gratitude. The best letter of all, 
 however, was the one which Gregory the Great was 
 too wise to write and did not write — claiming that, 
 as successor of St. Peter, he had absolute authority 
 and supremacy over all churches in general, and 
 over the new English Church in particular which 
 he himself founded and nursed. He did write other 
 letters expressly repudiating the title of "Universal 
 Bishop" for himself or any body else. Gregory's 
 worst and vaguest letter to Augustine, which might 
 be interpreted to squint that way, was the one in 
 which he says, "All the bishops of the British Isles 
 we commit to you, my brother . . . that the per- 
 verse may be corrected by authority." Whose au- 
 thority, Gregory's, or Augustine's, or botht I give 
 it up. 
 
 The old British Church had refused to accept the 
 authority given to Augustine. Their kinsmen, the 
 
 [111] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 heroic Scotic missionaries, who had won the greater 
 part of England for Christ, who had succeeded most 
 abundantly where the Romans had nearly failed, 
 were not prepared to surrender the venerable cus- 
 toms of their fathers, and of their saintly Founder 
 Columba, much less their ecclesiastical independence 
 which they felt to be involved, without a struggle. 
 Yet the time had come in the Providence of God 
 for the making of one national Church of England 
 as the great preliminary to the making of one Eng- 
 land. One of the latest "Manuals of English Church 
 History" in a single volume, and the best from an 
 Evangelical standpoint, is that of the late Charles 
 Hole, for twenty years lecturer in church history 
 in King's College, London — a valued associate of 
 Dean Wace. He says of this crisis, * ' The process of 
 conversion had resulted in the formation, not of a 
 Church (in the strict, later sense), but of a set of 
 distinct church-missions, which, originating in vary- 
 ing circumstances, patronized by rival kings, and 
 addressing different races, might have been, as to 
 doctrine and church constitution, a cluster of jeal- 
 ous and jarring communities. A nearer view reveals 
 these missionary churches as consenting in impor 
 tant points, differing in some minor ones. They 
 were in constitution Episcopal, in faith Catholic and 
 Orthodox according to the criteria of that age. . . . 
 Two nations, the Franks first, the Anglo-Saxons 
 next, had the distinction of being originally Or- 
 thodox and Catholic by conversion, and so, likewise 
 had the British, Irish, and Scotic Kelts of an earlier 
 
 [112] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 day. In certain usages, however, . . . the Heptarchal 
 churches differed among themselves according to 
 the sources of their conversion." 
 
 We are now to see the first stages of that gradual 
 process by which these separate churches of the 
 several kingdoms passed beyond the mission-stage, 
 and became welded together into one common and 
 compact organization known as the English Church. 
 The two separate streams of missionary influence and 
 conversion, whose life-giving and fertilizing waters 
 had penetrated to almost every part of the country, 
 were now about to flow together into one broad and 
 brimming river which should make glad the City 
 of God. The fusion of the diverse elements of 
 Roman and of Keltic Christianity would erelong be 
 moulded into proper shape and symmetry. But the 
 two streams could not meet and mingle into one 
 without some turbulence, without a considerable 
 ** troubling of the waters." The "waters '-meet" of 
 the English Church was at a place long afterwards 
 called ''Whitby," in the year of Grace 664, at the 
 Abby founded there seven years before by the Lady 
 Hilda, The spot is still marked by the stately ruins 
 that stand on the Yorkshire Cliffs fronting the Ger- 
 man ocean — ''one of the most note-worthy land 
 marks in the history of England." 
 
 The settlement of the differences between the two 
 parties was brought about by Oswy, then the power- 
 ful King of Northumbria and Over-lord of Britain. 
 His own domestic felicity, as well as the peace and 
 prosperity of the Church in his realm, were threat- 
 
 [113] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 ened by the rivalry of the factions, especially by the 
 serious inconvenience of his wife and himself keep- 
 ing Easter at two different times. The King had 
 held fast to the practice of his revered bishops, 
 Aidan, Finan and Colman, His Queen Eanfled had 
 been taught in Kent to follow her mother Ethel- 
 burga and to observe Easter as appointed by the 
 Roman Kalendar. Thus it came to pass on a certain 
 occasion that, while Oswy was rejoicing in the glad 
 festivities of Easter, Eanfleld and her children were 
 still observing the penitential fast of Holy "Week. 
 It was high time, the King thought, to put a stop 
 to such incongruities in his court, and the two 
 classes of churchmen must settle their differences. 
 The King therefore, called them together in a sort 
 of national synod, and told them to **get busy.'' 
 The leading representatives of the Scotic school 
 were King Oswy who presided, Bishop Colman, 
 Bishop Cedd, and the Abbess Hilda. On the other 
 side were Queen Eanfled and Prince Alchfrid, her 
 son, Agilbert, bishop of the West Saxons, Romanus, 
 chaplain to the Queen, James the deacon, and last 
 but not least, Wilfrid, of whom we recently heard 
 as the first successful missionary to the South 
 Saxons, twenty years later. He plays so conspicu- 
 ous a part at this turning-point of English Church 
 history and later on, that a brief sketch of his earlier 
 career will not be out of place here. Wilfrid was 
 a native of Northumbria, born in 634 of noble and 
 wealthy parents. At the age of thirteen his step- 
 mother was quite willing to part with the precocious 
 
 [114] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 youth, and sent him, nothing loth to leave her, to 
 the Northumbrian court, where he made his appear- 
 ance richly attired and armed, well mounted and 
 attended. The handsome and graceful lad, intelli- 
 gent and courteous, readily gained the favor of the 
 Queen. Discerning his inclination for the monastic 
 life, she opened the way for him to enter Lindis- 
 farne, where he spent three years as a novice under 
 the Scottish training and discipline, acquiring a 
 reputation for rare scholarship, and gaining the 
 affection of both teachers and pupils. He seems, 
 however, to have become dissatisfied with the nar- 
 row range of his Scottish tutors, and to have had 
 already a yearning for the wider culture of Rome. 
 Accordingly, with the approval of the authorities, 
 the Queen sent him to Canterbury, where for a year 
 he studied its church usages, and thence to Rome 
 itself in the company of Benedict Bishop, another 
 noble Northumbrian famous afterwards as a scholar 
 and traveller, a founder of monasteries and pro- 
 moter of ecclesiastical art. Wilfrid found at last 
 what he had longed for in the Eternal City, and, 
 under the Pope's favor, had rare opportunities of 
 studying the Roman rules and ritual at the fountain- 
 head. On his way to and from that city he halted at 
 Lyons, and became a favorite with its Archbishop 
 Annemundus, who would gladly have adopted him 
 as his son and heir. Here he spent three more years 
 of clerical study and received the Roman tonsure. 
 Upon his return to Northumbria in 658, Wilfrid be- 
 came the intimate friend of Prince Alchfrid, and 
 
 [116] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 also his tutor. The prince was already won over 
 to the Roman rather than the Scotic usages. This 
 young King of Deira had recently established a 
 monastery at Ripon, and put it under the charge of 
 Eata the Abbot, and Cuthbert, one of the monks of 
 Melrose Abby. In 661, Alchfrid had fallen so com- 
 pletely under the spell of Wilfrid and his strong 
 Roman proclivities, that he removed the Scotic 
 monks from Ripon and made Wilfrid abbot, and 
 had him ordained priest by Agilbert, bishop of 
 Wessex and a leader of the Roman party. This, 
 then, was the gifted and accomplished young man 
 chosen to champion the cause of Rome against lona 
 at the Whitby Conference, which soon narrowed 
 down to a debate between Colman and Wilfrid. 
 Bede has given us an account at considerable length 
 of this contest, and another account is found in the 
 biography of Wilfrid by Eddi. We will give a 
 sketch of the most salient points of the debate, which 
 was not very accurate or logical on either side, but 
 in which Colman was no match for the brilliant and 
 versatile Wilfrid. 
 
 King Oswy, on taking the chair, declared that ''it 
 behooved those who served one God to observe the 
 same rule of life ; and, as they all expected the same 
 kingdom in heaven, so they ought not to differ in 
 the celebration of the divine mysteries; but rather 
 to inquire which was the truest tradition, that the 
 same might be followed by all." He then com- 
 manded his Bishop Colman first to declare what the 
 custom was which he observed, and whence it de- 
 
 [116] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 rived its origin. Then Colman said, ''The Easter 
 which I keep, I received from my elders who sent 
 me bishop hither; all our forefathers, men beloved 
 of God, are known to have kept it after the same 
 manner; and, that the same may not seem to any 
 contemptible or worthy to be rejected, it is the 
 same which St. John the Evangelist, the disciple 
 beloved of our Lord, with all the churches over 
 which he presided, is recorded to have observed." 
 Bishop Agilbert was then called upon to ''show 
 whence his custom of keeping Easter was derived." 
 Agilbert asked that his disciple, the priest Wilfrid, 
 might speak in his stead. Then Wilfrid, being or- 
 dered by the King to speak, delivered himself thus: 
 "The Easter which we observe we saw celebrated 
 by all at Rome, where the blessed Apostles Peter and 
 Paul lived, taught, suffered, and were buried; we 
 saw the same done in Italy and in France, when we 
 travelled through those countries for pilgrimage and 
 prayer. We found this same practiced in Africa, 
 Asia, Egypt, Greece, and all the world — except only 
 these and their accomplices in obstinacy — I mean the 
 Picts and the Britons who foolishly in these two remote 
 islands of the world, and only in part even of them, 
 oppose all the rest of the universe." This was really 
 the strongest argument for Wilfrid's party, and 
 against the Scottish use — viz, : the Catholicity of the 
 Roman Easter — though stated with scorn and rude- 
 ness towards his opponents. To this Colman replied 
 with calm dignity, " It is strange that you will call our 
 labors foolish, wherein we follow the example of 
 
 [117] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 so great an Apostle who was thought worthy to lay 
 his head on our Lord's bosom." Wilfrid had no 
 difficulty in showing that the Keltic Easter had no 
 real warrant from St. John. "Is it to be believed/' 
 said Colman, "that our most reverend Father Col- 
 umba and his successors, men beloved by God, who 
 kept the Easter after the same manner, acted con- 
 trary to the Divine writings?" To which Wilfrid 
 answered, "I do not deny those to have been God's 
 servants and beloved by Him, who, with rustic sim- 
 plicity but pious intentions, have themselves loved 
 Him. Nor do I think that such keeping of Easter 
 was very prejudicial to them, as long as none came 
 to show them a more perfect rule; and yet I do 
 believe that they, if any Catholic adviser had come 
 among them, would as readily have followed his 
 admonitions as they are known to have kept those 
 commandments of God which they had learned to 
 know. But as for you and your companions, you 
 certainly sin, if, having heard the decrees of the 
 Apostolic See and of the Universal Church, and that 
 the same is confirmed by Holy Writ (for this last 
 Wilfrid had no warrant) you refuse to follow them; 
 for, though your fathers were holy, do you think 
 that their small number in a corner of the remotest 
 island is to be preferred before the Universal Church 
 of Christ throughout the world ? ' ' Here Wilfrid was 
 getting back on solid ground, though not likely to 
 carry his opponents with him by his offensive way 
 of putting it. Finally Wilfrid carried his case by 
 thundering out the favorite Text of all Romanists, 
 [118] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 even when, as here, it has nothing whatever to do 
 with the subject in hand. "If that Columba,'* he 
 cried, ''of yours (and I may say ours also, if he was 
 Christ's servant) was a holy man and powerful in 
 miracles, yet could he be preferred before the most 
 blessed Prince of the Apostles, to whom our Lord 
 said, 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will 
 build my Church, and the gates of hell shall not 
 prevail against it, and to thee I will give the keys 
 of the Kingdom of Heaven.' " This clinching sophis- 
 try of Wilfrid's, delivered, doubtless, in his most 
 imposing and impressive manner, carried conviction 
 straightway to the King, who, no doubt, had made 
 up his mind beforehand, and who had little trouble 
 in making up the minds of his people. "Is it true, 
 Colman," said the royal president of the confer- 
 ence, "that these words were spoken to Peter by 
 our Lord?" He answered, "It is true, King." 
 Then said he, "Can you show any such power given 
 to your Columba ? ' ' Colman answered, ' ' None. ' ' Then 
 added the King, "Do you both agree that these 
 words were principally directed to Peter, and that 
 the keys of heaven were given him by our Lord?" 
 They both answered, "We do." Then Oswy con- 
 cluded — whether in jest, or in sober earnest, it is 
 hard to say — "And I also say unto you, that he is 
 the door-keeper whom I will not contradict, but 
 will, as far as I know and am able, in all things obey 
 his decrees, lest when I come to the gates of the 
 kingdom of heaven, there should be none to open 
 
 [119] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 them, he being my adversary who is proved to 
 have the keys.'* 
 
 **The King having said this," is Bede's naive con- 
 clusion of the matter, ''all present, both great and 
 small, gave their assent, and, renouncing the more 
 imperfect institution, resolved to conform to that 
 which they found better." 
 
 Bede's statement that ''all present, both great and 
 small, gave their assent," is qualified by the title 
 of his next chapter — "Colman, being worsted, re- 
 turned home." Poor Colman, doubtless, felt '^ small'' 
 enough to fall under that class of assenters, but he 
 did not, could not conscientiously, consent to a 
 decision which seemed to him to repudiate and des- 
 pise (though it did not) the teaching of those saintly 
 men who had won Northumbria to Christ. And 
 so Colman mournfully turned his back upon his dear 
 Lindisfarne and the noble work he had loved so 
 well, and "went back into Scotland to consult with 
 his friends there as to what was to be done in this 
 case." Nor did he ever return. From lona he went 
 still further to Ireland, where the old Keltic customs 
 survived, and built a monastery off the coast of 
 Mayo, spending the rest of his life on the remote 
 Island Inisboffin, and dying there about twelve years 
 later. Colman also "took with him such as would 
 not comply with the Catholic Easter," his Irish 
 monks who stood loyally by him, and thirty North- 
 umbrian monks who clung to their master. As a 
 parting request, he asked that the conforming monks 
 of Lindisfarne might have for their Abbot in his 
 
 [120] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 stead the gentle and congenial Eata, an old pupil 
 of Aidan's and then Abbot of Melrose. This gladly 
 granted, Abbot Colman and his companions bade 
 farewell to the Holy Isle, consecrated by thirty years 
 under the Scottish saints. They took with them 
 some of the sacred bones of Aidan, its first bishop, 
 to deposit at his old home in lona. 
 
 To quote again from the Count de Montalembert : 
 — ''What heart is so cold as not to understand, to 
 sympathize and to journey with him along the 
 Northumbrian coast and over the Scottish moun- 
 tains, when, bearing homeward the bones of his 
 father Aidan, the proud but vanquished spirit re- 
 turned to his northern mists, and buried in the 
 sacred Isle of lona his defeat, and his unconquerable 
 fidelity to the traditions of his race." There is 
 nothing more pathetic in Bede's book than his 
 * 'Farewell to that old Scotic Church of Northum- 
 bria,** of which, Canon Bright says, "It could not 
 but pass away, for it could not provide what North- 
 umbria then needed; it had but a temporary mis- 
 sion, but that mission it fulfilled with a rare sim- 
 plicity of purpose. It brought religion straight 
 home to men's hearts by sheer power of love and 
 self-sacrifice." Here is the substance of Bede's Tri- 
 bute to the Scottish Saints of Northumbria : — ' ' ' The 
 place which Colman governed shows how frugal 
 he and his predecessors were, for there were very 
 few houses except the Church found at their depar- 
 ture ; indeed no more than were barely sufficient for 
 their daily residence; they had also no money, but 
 
 [121] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 cattle; for if they received any money from rich 
 persons, they immediately gave it to the poor. . . . 
 The King himself, v^hen opportunity offered, came 
 only with five or six servants, and, having performed 
 his devotions in the Church, departed. But, if they 
 happened to take a repast there, they were satis- 
 fied with only the plain and daily food of the breth- 
 ren, and required no more: for the whole care of 
 these teachers was to serve God, not the world, to 
 feed the soul and not the belly. For this reason 
 the religious habit was at that time in great venera- 
 tion; so that wheresoever any clergyman or monk 
 happened to come, he was joyfully received by all 
 persons as God's servant; and, if they chanced to 
 meet him upon the way, they ran to him, and bow- 
 ing, were glad to be signed with his hand or blessed 
 with his mouth. Great attention was also paid to 
 their exhortations; and on Sundays they flocked 
 eagerly to the Church, or the monasteries, not to 
 feed their bodies, but to hear the word of God ; and, 
 if any priest happened to come into a village, the 
 inhabitants flocked together to hear from him the 
 word of life ; for the priests and clergymen went into 
 the village on no other account than to preach, bap- 
 tize, visit the sick, and in few words, to take care 
 of souls ; and they were so free from worldly avarice 
 that none of them received lands and possessions for 
 building monasteries, unless they were compelled 
 to do so by the temporal authorities; which custom 
 was for some time after observed in all the churches 
 of the Northumbrians. But enough has been said 
 
 [122] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 on this subject.' " — Enough, surely, to make it very 
 plain that, whatever gain came to the Anglo-Saxon 
 Church by the decision at Whitby (and the gain 
 was very great) there was also very serious loss 
 in the departure of Colman and his companions. 
 The Church can ill-afford to lose at any time men of 
 the spirit of the Keltic missionaries, who were full 
 of the spirit of God. The humility, the childlike sim- 
 plicity, unworldliness, and generosity, the un- 
 bounded love and self-devotion to Christ and His 
 Gospel, the deep and pure personal religion, the 
 inflexible missionary zeal, the striking individuality 
 and independence, the love of liberty — which char- 
 acterized the Keltic saints, and set their stamp in- 
 delibly upon English religion, — if the Church had 
 had lost this by the decision at Whitby, no other 
 gains could have compensated for such a loss. But, 
 in losing Colman and his non-conforming monks, 
 it must not be supposed that the Church of England 
 lost the whole Keltic stock of clergy and laity, much 
 less the large number of their disciples and followers 
 who continued to feel their influence and example. 
 Even the ardent Romanist Wilfrid himself could not 
 forget or forsake the evangelizing and missionary 
 impulse which he had received at Lindisfarne, and 
 which made him an Evangelist of the benighted 
 Frisians and the backward South Saxons. Among 
 those of the Scotic party who accepted the Roman 
 customs because they were more Catholic, were 
 Bishop Cedd, who had acted as interpreter, Tuda, 
 who succeeded Colman in the Northumberland epis- 
 
 [123] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 copate, Chadd, brother of Cedd, wlio later filled 
 the same see, Eata, the new Abbot of Lindisfarne, 
 the hermit-saint Cuthbert, and erelong the English 
 disciples of the Scots generally. It would be the 
 greatest blunder, however, to suppose that these 
 became Romanists in the later and modern sense, 
 that they surrendered the best characteristics of 
 Keltic Christianity, or that the Anglo-Saxon Church 
 surrendered at once its independence, and became 
 thereby subject to the Roman See. Nothing of the 
 sort was asked, or granted at Whitby. The Roman 
 Church of that day was very different from later 
 mediaeval and modern Romanism. Papal pretensions 
 and aggressions, and English submission thereto 
 were to come later, but not for a long time yet. And 
 it was the Keltic love of ecclesiastical liberty that 
 helped to make the English Church so stubborn in 
 its resistance to papal aggression for centuries to 
 come. As Bishop Lightfoot says, "Through the long 
 ages of Roman domination the English Church was 
 the least enslaved of all the churches. Her statute- 
 book is a continued protest against this foreign ag- 
 gression. Her ablest kings were the resolute oppo- 
 nents of Roman usurpation. When the yoke was 
 finally thrown off, though the strong will of the 
 reigning sovereign was the active agent, yet it was 
 the independent spirit of the clergy and people 
 which rendered the change possible. Hence there 
 was no break in the continuity of the English 
 Church. Of this independent spirit which culmin- 
 
 [124] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 ated in the Reformation, Aidan, our spiritual 
 father, was the earliest embodiment.'* 
 
 No, the English Church has never altogether lost 
 the spiritual impulse of the Keltic Christianity in 
 its golden days. But its best days were over now in 
 England, and its continued isolation from the rest 
 of western Christendom in Scotland and Ireland 
 would prove disastrous there erelong. The reviv- 
 ing stream of Scotic influence which had come down 
 like a mountain torrent from lona to Lindisfarne, 
 and had flowed out thence through the greater part 
 of the Heptarchy, did not by any means run dry at 
 Whitby. It only mingled its waters with that other 
 stream from Rome to make one mightier river of 
 God for all England. The two together would prove 
 more effective than the two separated. The gains 
 were far greater than the loss to England and to 
 Christendom, when the Anglo-Saxon Church en- 
 tered into free and full fellowship with Latin Chris- 
 tianity — then the greatest power for good in the 
 world. In his "History of the English people," 
 Mr. Green gives a vivid picture of the missionary 
 power of the Irish Church in Great Britain and on 
 the continent of Europe. '*For a time," he says, it 
 seemed as if the course of the world's history was 
 to be changed, as if the older Keltic race that Roman 
 and German had swept before them had turned to 
 the moral conquest of their conquerors, — as if Keltic 
 and not Latin Christianity was to mold the des- 
 tinies of the churches of the West." But he pre- 
 sents another picture when he comes to a later time 
 
 [125] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 and to the wholesome effects of the conclusion at 
 Whitby. ** Trivial in fact," he declares, '*as were 
 the actual points of difference which severed the 
 Roman Church from the Irish, the question to which 
 communion Northumbria should belong was of im- 
 mense moment to the after-fortunes of England. 
 Had the Church of Aidan finally won, the later 
 ecclesiastical history would probably have resem- 
 bled that of Ireland. Devoid of that power of or- 
 ganization which was the strength of the Roman 
 Church, the Keltic Church in its own Irish home 
 took the Clan system of the country as the basis of 
 church government. . . j. Hundreds of wandering 
 bishops, a vast religious authority wielded by hered- 
 itary chieftains, the dissociation of piety from mor- 
 ality, the absence of those larger and more human- 
 izing influences which contact with a wider world 
 alone can give, this is the picture which the Irish 
 Church, of later times presents to us. It was from 
 such a chaos as this that England was saved by the 
 victory of Rome in the Synod of Whitby. ' ^ 
 
 Yes, it was high time for the Church of the Anglo- 
 Saxon peoples to emerge from its purely mission 
 stage, to advance beyond the stage of isolated, scat- 
 tered settlements here and there, grouped loosely 
 around some monastic or episcopal seat, with neither 
 parochial nor diocesan organization; time for it to 
 become one united and compact organism. It 
 Qceded an efficient and settled government of its 
 own, with an uniform system of regular institutions 
 and definite laws, which should bind all its members 
 
 [126] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 together into one common body, and bring it into 
 closer relations with the larger and richer life and 
 civilization and learning of the Catholic Church in 
 the rest of Europe. Clearly, this was a stage of 
 advancement to which the Scotch-Irish Church was 
 not equal. It was something which Rome alone 
 could then supply, with its genius for organization, 
 and law and order. In Mr. Wakeman's brilliant 
 book, **An Introduction to the History of the 
 Church of England, ' ' he says of the Keltic Church, — 
 "It could arouse, but it could not maintain; it could 
 win, but it could not govern. The combination of 
 Keltic self-sacrifice and zeal with the discipline and 
 the culture of Rome was needed before the English 
 Church could fully awake to the responsibilities of 
 her high-position. . . . The Keltic Church found 
 its best method of work in the personal contact of 
 soul with soul, its truest source of influence in the 
 example of the Christ-like life lived once more 
 among men. Without the assistance of Rome there 
 could never have been built up in England a great 
 organized and cultured church, able to hold its own 
 among the storms of Christendom. Without the 
 help of the Saints of lona, that Church would have 
 been but a mechanism of bones and flesh wanting 
 the life-giving soul. . . . Both the arguments (of 
 Colman and Wilfrid at the Whitby Conference) 
 were unhistorical, but behind the arguments used 
 lay the real questions which were involved — isola- 
 tion or unity, law or chaos, culture or ignorance, 
 progress or backwardness. . . . Roman tradition 
 
 [127] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 and papal authority were the forces which in the 
 coming ages were to conquer the barbarian world, 
 and consecrate it to the service of Christ. The de- 
 cision at Whitby meant that the Church of Eng- 
 land had determined to take her part in that noble 
 work. ' ' 
 
 Before taking up the epoch-making career of 
 Theodore, the first great Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 let us glance briefly at some of the events which 
 followed the Whitby Conference, and some of the 
 principal personages concerned. Tuda, who suc- 
 ceeded Colman as Northumbrian bishop, was car- 
 ried off by a terrible plague that visited England. 
 Then came Wilfrid's great opportunity, of which he 
 did not avail himself very worthily. Being ap- 
 pointed to succeed Tuda, he wanted things done in 
 the best Roman style. He resolved, therefore, to 
 transfer the Northumbrian See from humble Lin- 
 disfarne to York, where Gregory had fixed the sec- 
 ond Archbishopric of England, and where Bishop 
 Paulinus had fixed his See. Wilfrid resolved, also, 
 to be consecrated by bishops of whose Roman reg- 
 ularity and Orthodoxy there could be no question. 
 So King Oswy sent him to the King of the Gauls, 
 and the famous champion of Rome was received with 
 great honor at Court. He was consecrated Bishop 
 at Compiegne by twelve bishops, of whom his old 
 friend Agilbert, formerly Bishop of Wessex now 
 of Paris, was one. These prelates carried him into 
 the church in a golden chair, and everything was 
 done with Parisian pomp and ceremony. Wilfrid 
 
 [128] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 was so enamored of his prelatical honors abroad 
 that he remained away from his see for about a 
 year. Meanwhile there was trouble at home, and his 
 diocese became weary of waiting for the wilful 
 Wilfrid. Accordingly the King appointed Chad in 
 his place. Chad went to countrj^fied Kent to be con- 
 secrated without any city style. But the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury Deusdedit had also been carried off 
 by the plague, and the See was vacant. The only 
 bishop accessible was Wini the West Saxon Bishop 
 at Winchester. Here then Chad was consecrated 
 by Wini and two British bishops secured to make 
 the canonical number of three. I wonder what 
 Wilfrid and the other high-churchman thought of 
 these two. This is the only instance in which the old 
 British bishops had as yet cooperated in any way 
 with the Church of the English. It looked as if 
 the British in Cornwall and Wales were relenting 
 and becoming reconciled to their Saxon neighbors. 
 Chad, whom Bede describes as ''a holy man of mod- 
 est behavior, well read in the Scriptures and dili- 
 gently practicing those things which he had learned 
 therein, being thus consecrated bishop, began im- 
 mediately to devote himself to ecclesiastical truth 
 and to chastity; to apply himself to humility, con- 
 tinence and study ; to travel about, not on horseback, 
 but after the manner of the Apostles on foot, to 
 spread the Gospel in towns, the open country, cot- 
 tages, villages and castles; for he was one of the 
 disciples of Aidan, and endeavored to instruct his 
 people by the same actions and behavior, accord- 
 
 [129] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 ing to his and his brother Cedd's example." There 
 was evidently no immediate danger of Keltic sim- 
 plicity and devotion dying out under brother Chad's 
 episcopate. The contrast to Wilfrid's ''golden 
 chair" and magnificence is rather striking. 
 
 Shortly after Chad had entered upon his reluc- 
 tant episcopate, ''clothed with humility," which 
 fitted him better than cope and mitre, "Wilfrid at 
 last made a modest start homeward from giddy Gaul 
 in princely prelatical style with only one hundred 
 and twenty attendants. As he was crossing the 
 channel, a sudden storm of the usual sort drove his 
 ship ashore on the South Saxon coast, from which 
 he barely escaped with his life, and to which at a 
 later time he returned to do a noble evangelizing 
 work, which more than compensated for his follies. 
 Upon his arrival in Northumbria, finding himself 
 supplanted in his See, he submitted with a good 
 grace, and went quietly to work in his monastery at 
 Ripon, for Wilfrid was never an idler. He was 
 always a busy body, whether in his own affairs or in 
 others. This, however, did not satisfy his restless 
 energies; for — during a vacancy in the episcopate of 
 Mercia — he performed such successful episcopal 
 functions there that the King would gladly have 
 given him that See. Here also he founded new mon- 
 asteries, and among them Lichfield. His energies 
 also extended into Kent, where at the King's 
 request, he supplied for a time the vacant See of 
 Rochester. At Canterbury, too, we find his brilliant 
 personality and versatile genius attracting to him- 
 
 [130] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 self a band of talented young men, especially those 
 skilled in music, architecture and other ecclesias- 
 tical arts. One of them was Eddius Stephanus or 
 Eddi, his future biographer. Some of these followed 
 him back to Northumbria, and enabled him to do 
 great things there for the restoration and adornment 
 of its churches. Not long after, a question was 
 raised as to the regularity of Chad's appointment 
 to York, and that modest gentleman meekly re- 
 signed the See, and Wilfrid was promptly and prop- 
 erly put in his place, — Chad retiring to the quiet 
 and congenial episcopate of Lichfield. 
 
 I cannot conclude this lecture better than by pre- 
 senting to you two strongly contrasted pictures of the 
 two types of Churchmen, the Keltic and the Roman, 
 now comprehended in the United Church of Northum- 
 bria, soon to be the one Church of the English race. 
 I will give you the beginning of Wilfrid's glorious 
 Episcopate at York, — as condensed by Bright from 
 Eddi; and the close of Chad's humble but glorious 
 also, Episcopate at Lichfield, — as condensed by 
 William Hunt from the venerable Bede: 
 
 '* Wilfrid was then at the height of his prosperity 
 and popularity. We seem to see him going about 
 his diocese with the energy of one born to 'repair 
 the breaches' and 'build the old waste places:' at 
 York he 'shuddered' to see his cathedral fallen into 
 a miserable dilapidation — the roofs decaying, the 
 windows devoid of glass, and the inner walls 
 blotched with rain and haunted by birds. He re- 
 paired the roofs, covered them with lead, glazed the 
 [131] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND 
 
 windows, cleaned the walls with lime, decked the 
 altar with new furniture, and obtained new property 
 for the Church. At his beloved Ripon he reared 'a 
 basilica of polished stone, towering to a great height, 
 with pillars of varied form, and arched vaults, and 
 winding cloisters ; ' and invited the King, his brother 
 Alfwin and a number of sub-kings, reeves and ab- 
 bots to attend the dedication 'in honor of the Prince 
 of the Apostles.' On such a day he was truly in 
 tis element; and we may imagine the interest with 
 which the function would be watched by a little 
 boy then being trained up in the monastery, after- 
 wards the great missionary, Archbishop Willibrord. 
 The altar, vested in purple and cloth of gold, was 
 elaborately blessed, the paten and chalice hallowed, 
 the Eucharist celebrated. Then Wilfrid in front of 
 the altar, with his face towards the people, recited 
 a list of the lands recently or previously bestowed 
 upon him, and also the sanctuaries once held by the 
 British Church. . . . Wilfrid added to his other 
 gifts adornments for God's House, a large golden 
 cross, and a canopy of the Gospels in four volumes, 
 written in letters of gold on richly colored parch- 
 ment, all contained in a case wrought with gold and 
 jewels — a treasure long preserved in Ripon Minster. 
 A.t Hexam, also, on land given by the pious queen 
 Ethelred, he built in honor of St. Andrew a church 
 of great length and height, with * manifold columns 
 and porches, a complication of ascending and 
 descending passages'. . . which Eddi describes as 
 'a structure that, as far as he knew, had no equal 
 
 [132] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 on this side of the Alps.* The crypt of this church 
 still remains as a monument of that time." 
 
 This great churchman, evidently, believed, with 
 David, that, (* 'where it can be had") **the House 
 to be builded for the Lord God must be exceeding 
 magnifical." 
 
 ''The bishop," we are further told, **also exerted 
 himself for the improvement of Divine Service : he 
 set Eddi and Aeona to carry on the special work of 
 Church-Song." But, if Wilfrid was magnificent as a 
 church-builder, and active as a promoter of choral 
 worship, he was also indefatigable as a Chief Pastor. 
 "He is depicted as riding about incessantly to baptize 
 and confirm, holding ordinations forming new 
 church settlements, and, amid all this whirl of activ- 
 ities, retaining his habits of ascetic devotion. . . . 
 At the same time, no austerity of manner was dis- 
 cernible in him ; he made himself 'dear and loveable* 
 to people of all races, and his gracious geniality, the 
 outcome of a genuinely kind heart, was like sun- 
 shine to all who felt its presence. He was the typ- 
 ical man of Church and Nation. 
 
 "This is the picture of Wilfrid in the splendors 
 of a well-deserved ascendency. We shall see ere- 
 long how the unique brilliancy of his position con- 
 tributed to provoke a great vicissitude, which did 
 but bring into fuller light the real nobleness of a 
 princely and a Christian soul." 
 
 Now look on the other picture of the saintly 
 Chad's Last Days. "Chad fixed his See at Lichfield, 
 and lived there for two years and a half. ... He 
 [133] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND 
 
 spent his time for the most part in travelling about 
 preaching the Gospel, as he had done in Northum- 
 bria. Yet he had, of course, some seasons of rest. 
 Near his Church at Lichfield, which was dedicated 
 to St. Mary and stood to the East of the present Cathe- 
 dral, he built himself a hut, and there he dwelt when 
 he was not engaged in preaching in other parts, 
 and passed his days in reading and prayer with 
 some seven or eight of his monks. Ever recognizing 
 the presence of God and mindful of the uncertainty 
 of life, he was full of godly awe, which was appar- 
 ent in all his words and actions. . . . This conscious- 
 Qess of standing always in the awful presence of 
 God was the secret of his deep humility. Early in 
 the year 672, the plague carried off a large number 
 of his monks, and so it happened on a time that he 
 was staying in his house with only one monk named 
 Owine. This Owine had left all that he had and 
 appeared at Chad 's monastery at Lastingham carry- 
 ing an axe and a hatchet ; for, as he had not enough 
 learning to study the Scriptures, he determined to 
 serve God by working with his hands. He had fol- 
 lowed Chad to Lichfield, and was with him when the 
 call came to the bishop which had come to so many 
 of his monks. One day when he was working in the 
 fields near the bishop 's dwelling, Owine deemed that 
 he heard sweet voices singing, and the sound was as 
 though it was coming down from heaven to earth, 
 and at last it filled the oratory where he knew that 
 Chad was. As he looked towards the building, Chad 
 opened the window and clapped his hands, as he 
 
 [134] 
 
THE COMING-TOGETHER 
 
 was wont to do when he would call some one to him. 
 Owine obeyed the call, and Chad bade him go to 
 to the Church and fetch ''the seven brethren," evi- 
 dently the elders of the monastery, and come back 
 with them. When they had come, he exhorted them 
 to live in love and peace together, and diligently to 
 observe the monastic rale and all that they had 
 learned from him, 'For,^ said he (of his approach- 
 ing death), 'the gentle guest who has of late visited 
 our brethren, has deigned to come to me today and 
 call me from this world,' and he bade them tell the 
 brethren to pray for him and to watch with prayer 
 and good works for the day of their own departure. 
 Seven days later, he died, after having received the 
 Holy Eucharist. While other fathers of the English 
 Church equalled St. Chad in diligence and devotion, 
 his place is high among those 'holy and humble 
 men of heart,' who, having lived as in the constant 
 presence of God, stand before their Lord's face, 
 and praise Him and magnify Him forever." 
 
 The comprehensiveness of the Anglican Com- 
 munion has not yet failed to include such different 
 types of Churchmen as Wilfrid and Chad. 
 
 [135] 
 
The Coming of Theodore, and the Organization op 
 THE Early English Church 
 
 There are always these two principal constituents 
 of a real Church : — Life and Organization. But these 
 twain must become one, — they must be married to 
 one another. Without the regenerate life of men, 
 which comes from the presence and power of a living 
 and life-giving Christ within individual souls, there 
 can be only the semblance of a Church, only its empty 
 shell. And, without an organism of its own, even 
 the most Christian life will lack the necessary instru- 
 ment for its conservation and propagation among 
 men. The Apostolic figure of the Church is not that 
 of *' stones," however beautiful and polished, lying 
 scattered and separate ; but of a ** building fitly framed 
 together," — or, better still, of a ''living body," with 
 its intimate and sympathetic connection of all the 
 members. 
 
 Now the Evangelization of the English, probably 
 of a larger part of them, — their conversion to Christ 
 and their real Christian life, was largely due to the 
 Scotch-Irish missionaries from lona, the livest and 
 most successful missionary force then in Western 
 Europe. But the ultimate Organization of English 
 Christianity, starting from different sources and 
 representing different types, — its Consolidation into 
 
 [136] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 one English Church, was mainly the work of the 
 Church of Rome, then the most unifying and effective 
 organization in Christendom. 
 
 The Foundation of the English Church was laid 
 securely by Augustine, the Pioneer, sent from Rome 
 for that purpose. But the Building erected thereon 
 was begun by a far greater man than he, by the first 
 great Archbishop of Canterbury, who was a Greek 
 monk sent from Rome. This man was Theodore of 
 Tarsus, a native of St. Paul's birthplace. *' Tarsus,'* 
 it has been well said, **had produced a St. Paul to 
 found churches at the extreme east of Europe; and 
 it produced a Theodore to consolidate newly founded 
 churches at the extreme west. The apostle and this 
 organizer were very unlike one another in many 
 things ; but both of them had great gifts for the work 
 which God required them to do." (Alfred Plummer.) 
 
 Bede says of Theodore, **He was the first of the 
 archbishops whom the whole English Church con- 
 sented to obey." The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says, 
 "Before Theodore the archbishops were Roman, after 
 him they were all English," and English they con- 
 tinued to be for three hundred and fifty years. "This 
 marks him," says Professor Montagu Burrows in his 
 "Commentaries on the History of England," "even 
 more than Augustine, as a central figure for all time 
 in English history. The English Church under him 
 ceased to be a mission church, and became national. 
 . . . The Keltic Church w£is blended with the Roman, 
 but the composite Church, though Romanized, was 
 still opposed to what was afterwards called ultra- 
 
 [137] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 montanism. ... It was indeed a Roman organiza- 
 tion, and yet in a sense it was non-Roman and Na- 
 tional. Like Columba, Augustine and Aidan, Theo- 
 dore is the typical man of his own times. ' ' 
 
 Yes, the Keltic spirit and life, breathed into the 
 Roman order and organization, were the chief con- 
 stituents that created the English Church into a living 
 organism, akin to both its predecessors, but different 
 from both — sui generis. And the master mind, the 
 resolute will, and the strong hand that brought this 
 about were those of Theodore. The Conference at 
 Whitby brought, rather slowly, uniformity of ob- 
 servance, but the new kind of Archbishop brought 
 unity of organization and administration. He made 
 the two parties not only act alike, but act together 
 as one body. Let us see how Theodore came upon 
 the scene, and the part he played when he got there. 
 It is a curious story. The last Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury and the first English-bom archbishop, called 
 Deusdedit, had been carried off by the plague, some 
 years before, and the vacancy had not yet been filled. 
 None of the recent incumbents had gone outside of 
 Kent, nor amounted to very much there. It was high 
 time for a new type. It was rather indicative of a 
 new order of things that the two principal Kings, 
 Oswy of Northumbria and Egbert of Kent, agreed 
 together to fill the vacancy at Canterbury by uniting 
 in the choice of a monk there named Wighard, who 
 was also acceptable to the whole Church. In order 
 that Wighard might have the benefit of wider observa- 
 tion and experience at Rome, now the recognized 
 
 [138] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 model of the English Church, and the prestige of 
 consecration by the bishop of the Apostolic See, he 
 was sent thither, but died before he could be con- 
 secrated. Although the two kings do not seem to 
 have asked the Pope, Vitalian, to select another man 
 for them in the place of Wighard, he found it con- 
 venient to take this for granted, and no objection 
 was made. The Pope's first choice was an accom- 
 plished abbot of a monastery near Naples, named 
 Hadrian, of African race (not a negro, however). 
 Hadrian modestly declined the honor, but recom- 
 mended a friend, whom he thought more competent. 
 This was a Greek monk not yet in orders, although he 
 was sixty-six years of age, who had but recently come 
 to Rome. He had studied at Athens, was a scholar in 
 Greek and Latin, in sacred and secular learning, and 
 eminent in philosophy, so that he was called **the 
 Philosopher." This man was Theodore of Tarsus. 
 The Pope accepted him on condition that Hadrian, 
 who stood sponsor for him, should accompany him 
 to England and help him in the difficult work ahead. 
 The Monothelite heresy was very prevalent among the 
 Greeks then, and was regarded as worse than the 
 plague. The Pope probably feared that this Greek 
 might be infected, and intended that Hadrian should 
 stand guard over his orthodoxy. 
 
 At any rate Hadrian, who had spent much time in 
 Gaul, would certainly be a valuable ally and adviser 
 to his friend. So the lay-monk was hurried through 
 the minor orders, and out of his Greek tonsure into 
 the Latin ; and, then, on March 26th, in the year 668, 
 
 [139] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 he was consecrated by the Pope as ** Archbishop of 
 the Church of the English/' Besides Hadrian, the 
 noted English scholar and traveler, Benedict Biscop, 
 also accompanied the new prelate as teacher and inter- 
 preter in the English language. After a considerable 
 stay in Gaul, at Aries and Paris, where he was the 
 guest of Bishop Agilbert — who could give him much 
 information about the English Church — the Arch- 
 bishop and Biscop arrived at Canterbury, where Had- 
 rian soon joined them. The Metropolitan See had 
 now been vacant for five years. The outlook was far 
 from encouraging. The contentions between the two 
 factions, although nominally healed at Whitby, had 
 brought about a chaotic condition. There were no 
 regular parishes yet nor settled pastors — no Diocesan 
 system in the strict sense. The so-called Dioceses 
 were the kingdoms of the Heptarchy, generally very 
 large, with but one bishop for each, and he not tied 
 to his see. 
 
 These bishoprics, too, were now mostly vacant. The 
 only bishops left at Theodore's arrival were Wilfrid 
 and Chad and Wini. Wilfrid and Chad were claim- 
 ants to the same See, and Wini was a doubtful charac- 
 ter with a very shady episcopate. A wise, resolute and 
 energetic man was required to deal with the situation, 
 and such Theodore proved to be during the twenty- 
 two years of his episcopate, although he was far from 
 young at the start. His appointment was as thor- 
 oughly justified as that of the late Archbishop Tem- 
 ple, his far-off successor. **He was called upon to 
 unite the Church of the English, to organize it by 
 
 [140] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 giving it an efficient and orderly Episcopate and the 
 means of self-government, to institute a rational dis- 
 ciplinary system, and to train ''the religions" of both 
 sexes from an overweening enthusiasm for extrava- 
 gant ascetcism to a zeal for learning and teaching. ' ' 
 
 Benedict Bicop was appointed by Theodore to the 
 temporary charge of the Abbey of St. Peter and St. 
 Paul at Canterbury, and Hadrian accompanied the 
 new archbishop in his first round of visitation through- 
 out his vast province. He visited all the Sees of the 
 Heptarchy, studying the situation in each, supplying 
 what was lacking, strengthening the things that re- 
 mained, establishing with a firm hand his Metropoli- 
 tan authority, disseminating the rule of right living 
 and the Catholic mode of celebrating Easter. He was 
 everywhere received with honor, and his authority was 
 everywhere recognized as that of "the right man in 
 the right place," who was sorely needed. 
 
 One of Theodore's first measures was to fill the 
 vacant Sees. Putta was consecrated for Rochester, 
 Bisi for East Anglia, and Leutherius for Wessex. 
 When Northumbria was reached, Theodore effected 
 an amicable settlement of a difficult case. Not satis- 
 fied with the regularity of Chad 's consecration to that 
 very important See, he promptly secured his resigna- 
 tion. According to Bede, the very humble Chad, an- 
 swered in characteristic fashion, "If you are per- 
 suaded that I received the episcopate in an irregular 
 manner, I willingly retire from the office, for I never 
 thought myself worthy of it. ' ' Wilfrid was promptly 
 put back in the place to which he had been originally 
 
 [141] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 appointed, and resumed business at the old stand, 
 Having supplied whatever he regarded as lacking 
 in Chad's orders, the Archbishop soon had him trans- 
 ferred to Lichfield, as we have seen. In this connec- 
 tion we have one of the very few personal traits of 
 Theodore which Bede has preserved, and which shows 
 that the stern, autocratic and strong-handed prelate 
 was not without a tender place in his heart. His 
 special liking for the holy and humble Chad increases 
 our liking for Theodore. The Archbishop insisted 
 that Chad should not make such long episcopal jour- 
 Qcys on foot; and when he could not otherwise over- 
 come the bishop's reluctance to the luxury of riding 
 on horseback, he said, "You shall ride," and then 
 lifted Chad bodily into the saddle. I wonder what 
 Chad would have thought of an automobile. This 
 sounds not unlike some of the stories of Archbishop 
 Temple. 
 
 Having thus made a fair beginning towards the 
 stupendous work of organizing his Church, Theodore 's 
 next step was to summon the first deliberative and 
 legislative body of the whole English Church. It 
 met at Hertford on September 24th, 673. According 
 to the Nicene rules and the canons of the later Gen- 
 eral Councils, a Provincial Synod was a necessary 
 part of a regular Church organization. Such Synods 
 had become usual in the Western church elsewhere, 
 and even the banished British Church in Wales had 
 not given up its Synods. The new English Church, 
 its successor and supplanter, was now to take its 
 proper place in Catholic Christendom by organizing 
 
 [142] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 its first Provincial Synod. Theodore the Metropolitan 
 presided. Only four of his six bishops were present 
 in person. Wilfrid was represented only by his dele- 
 gates, and Wini, the simoniacal bishop of London, did 
 Qot show up either in person or by proxy. Strictly 
 speaking, the Synod was composed of Bishops only, 
 according to the ancient usage, which might have 
 beep improved. But it was no violation of Catholic 
 custom that there should sit with the bishops on this 
 occasion, as Bede has it, ''Many other teachers of the 
 Church who loved and were acquainted with the 
 canonical statutes of the fathers." Bede has pre- 
 served the account of the Archbishop himself duly 
 attested by Titillus, his notary. Its proceeding opened 
 with the solemn invocation: "In the name of our 
 Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, who reigns for- 
 ever and ever, and governs His Church, it was thought 
 meet that we should assemble, according to the cus- 
 tom of the venerable canons, to treat about the neces- 
 sary affairs of the Church." 
 
 Then follows the Primate's Address, ''I beseech 
 you, most dear brothers, for the love and fear of our 
 Redeemer, that we may all treat in common for our 
 faith; to the end that whatsoever has been decreed 
 and defined by the holy and reverend fathers may be 
 inviolably observed by all. " " Much more, ' ' the Arch- 
 bishop spoke, "tending to the preservation and unity 
 of the Church. ' ' Then each bishop in order was asked 
 "whether he consented to observe the things that had 
 been formerly canonically decreed by the fathers." 
 To which each answered, "Placet" — "It so pleases 
 
 [143] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 us, and we will all most willingly observe with a 
 cheerful mind whatever is laid down in the Canons 
 of the holy fathers." 
 
 Whereupon the Primate produced a collection of 
 such Canons, beginning with the so-called "Apostolic 
 Canons" and including those of the principal Coun- 
 cils from Nicea to Chalcedon. From these he selected 
 ten as specially appropriate to the then needs of the 
 English Church. 
 
 In brief , this is the summary : (I) That all should 
 keep Easter on the Sunday after the 14th moon; 
 (II) That no bishop should trespass on the diocese 
 of another; (III) That no bishop should trouble any 
 monastery or take away its possessions; (IV) That 
 no monk should wander from his own monastery to 
 another unless by permission of his abbot; (V) That 
 no clergyman should leave his diocese without letters 
 commendatory from his diocesan, and should return 
 if summoned by his bishop, on pain of excommunica- 
 tion; (VI) That stranger bishops and clergy should 
 not officiate in a diocese without leave of the diocesan ; 
 (VII) That a synod should meet twice a year — after 
 debate, once a year (at a place called Clovesho) was 
 agreed upon; (VIII) That precedence among bishops 
 should be regulated by the dates of consecration; 
 
 (IX) That the number of the episcopate should be in- 
 creased — which was debated, but action was deferred ; 
 
 (X) That only lawful marriage should be allowed; 
 That no one should leave his wife except, as the 
 Gospel teaches, for the cause of fornication, and that 
 
 [144] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 no Christian who had put away his wife should marry 
 another. 
 
 When these Canons had been accepted the Notary 
 wrote them out, and the archbishops and bishops 
 formally signed their names thereto. "This act," 
 says Bishop Stubbs, ''which seems to be a formal 
 acceptance on the part of the English Churches of 
 the common Diocesan system of the Church at large, 
 is of the highest historical importance as the first con- 
 stitutional measure of the collective English race; no 
 act of secular legislation can be produced parallel to 
 it before the reign of Alfred, or rather of his son 
 Edward." 
 
 Such, then, was the first legislative body that made 
 laws for all the English, — the precursor, therefore, not 
 only of the later Convocations of the Church, but also 
 of the National Witenagemots and Parliaments of 
 England — so that Theodore holds an important place 
 among the Makers of England, as well as of the Eng- 
 lish Church. ''It was the Ecclesistical Synods," says 
 Green, "which by their example led the way to our 
 National Parliament, as it was the Canons enacted in 
 such Synods which led the way to a national system 
 of law." "This year 673," says Charles Hole, "was 
 at least 150 years before the civil rule of the Hep- 
 tarchy coalesced into a Monarchy. In other words, 
 the English Church is much older than the English 
 Monarchy. * ' 
 
 The Canon passed at Hertford which prescribed an 
 annual church council could hardly be carried out 
 with any regularity during the unsettled condition of 
 
 [145J 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGTiAND 
 
 political affairs and the wars between the kingdoms. 
 But the precedent was established, and Theodore cer- 
 tainly held a second Synod at Hatfield in 680 — the 
 only other in his day of which we have any record. 
 This was called in compliance with Pope Agatho's 
 desire that the English Church should take action in 
 regard to the monothelite heresy. This was done in 
 the most orthodox fashion. A notable fact mentioned 
 by Bede, in his account of this Synod, is its acknow- 
 ledgment, at so early a date of what is called the 
 ^'Filioque'^ in the Creed, the double procession of the 
 Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. After de- 
 claring its acceptance of the Five Ecumenical and the 
 Lateran Council at Rome, it closes with an ' ' ascription 
 of glory to God — the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
 Ghost proceeding from the Father and the Son in 
 an ineffable manner, as those holy apostles, prophets, 
 and doctors did declare." 
 
 Theodore, having now made the Diocesan Episco- 
 pate a practical reality, and tied the bishop to his See, 
 and given him a definite body of laws by which to 
 administer it, — the next step was to increase the num- 
 ber of English bishops from seven to seventeen. He 
 proposed to accomplish this by dividing the immense 
 sees coterminous with the kingdoms, until each bishop 
 should have a manageable diocese, in which he might 
 have a chance to do the work required. He had raised 
 this question in the Synod at Hertford, but it had 
 met with opposition, and no action had been taken. 
 It was undoubtedly a necessary thing to do, and it 
 could only be done by radical measures, in which 
 
 [146] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 Theodore strained "the one-man power"- — sometimes 
 a necessity but always dangerous — to the utmost. 
 His first efforts in this direction caused -little trouble. 
 The sickness and retirement of Bisi from the bishopric 
 of East Anglia gave him the opportunity to divide 
 that diocese into two, one for the North folk and the 
 other for the South folk. In Mercia he took the 
 autocratic measure of deposing Winfrid the successor 
 of Chad for some disobedience of which we are 
 ignorant, and dividing that immense diocese into five — 
 Lichfield, Hertford, Worcester, Leicester and Syd- 
 nacester. His method of proceeding seems to have 
 been to get the approval of the King and his Witan, 
 and then to go ahead, whether the bishop chiefly con- 
 cerned liked it or not. The division of Wessex was, 
 however, postponed until after the death of its bishop. 
 But the battle-royal came when Northumbria was 
 reached, and two strong wills like those of Theodore 
 and Wilfrid came into collision. Then you could see 
 the fur fly. Wilfrid was already in hot water with 
 King Egfrid and his new queen (new queens are apt 
 to be partial to new methods), and they were only 
 too glad to see him shorn of a good part of his power 
 and pomp. 
 
 It must be admitted, I think, that Theodore dealt 
 far from frankly or fairly with Wilfrid, when, in 
 conjunction with his enemy the King and after con- 
 sulting other bishops, he proceeded to divide Wil- 
 frid's diocese and even to consecrate bishops for the 
 three newly created sees therein, without consulting 
 him or even giving him notice beforehand. It seems 
 
 [147] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHUECH OF ENGLAND 
 
 to have been taken for granted by all parties that 
 Wilfrid would never consent — which was doubtless 
 true — and that the thing must be done without his 
 consent. Wilfrid seems to have been absent at the 
 time, but, upon his return he appeared promptly be- 
 fore Egfrid and Theodore in a Northumbrian gemot, 
 and demanded why his diocese was thus cut up with- 
 out his consent. He found little comfort in the cool 
 reply, ' ' We find no fault in you, but we have thought 
 good to do this, and we shall abide by it.'' William 
 of Malmesbury fitly quotes Juvenal's ^^sic volo, sic 
 juheo.'^ Without further parleying Wilfrid an- 
 nounced that he would carry his case to what he con- 
 sidered the fountain-head of authority, of equity and 
 justice. He soon appeared in person at Rome and 
 made his appeal for justice to Pope Agatho, — one of 
 whose predecessors had sent Augustine to found the 
 Church of the English, and another, Vitalian, had 
 recently chosen and consecrated Theodore as arch- 
 bishop of the English. This first instance in English 
 history of an appeal to the Pope against the action 
 of the English civil and ecclesiastical authorities was 
 a precedent destined to bring ever-increasing trouble 
 and conflict as the papal pretensions steadily ad- 
 vanced, and was never finally settled until it was 
 settled right at the Reformation. Wilfrid, of course, 
 was received with greater eclat than ever at Rome. 
 Theodore simply sent one of his monks, Kenwarld, 
 with a written statement of his side of the controversy. 
 The case was duly considered by the Pope and his 
 council. They decided (wisely enough) that Wilfrid 
 
 [148] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 should be restored to his original bishopric, that the 
 intruding bishops should be ousted, and, this done, 
 that Wilfrid himself, with the consent of a synod 
 to be called at York, should choose bishops as 
 assistants with whom he could live peaceably, who 
 should be consecrated by Theodore. The usual penal- 
 ties were denounced against all who should attempt 
 to resist this sentence, or not receive it obediently. 
 Wilfrid returned in triumph, to Northumbria bearing 
 as the banner of his victory the papal decree with 
 its leaden bullae and its Apostolic seal duly attached. 
 But the presentation of this formidable document to 
 the King and his Witan was far from striking terror 
 into their stubborn hearts. They rejected with in- 
 dignation and scorn the man who had sought the 
 interference of any foreign authority, even the most 
 venerated, in their domestic affairs. There is no 
 question, I think, that, as things stood then, Wilfrid 
 had the right to appeal from the decision of his 
 Metropolitan to the Pope, and that the Pope had the 
 right to pronounce the decision of the Papal court; 
 but it is probable that the ''Decretal" was not re- 
 garded yet as a command, and that neither party was 
 bound to accept it as more than advice. It is worthy 
 of notice that neither Theodore nor King Egbert and 
 his council raised the question as to the Pope's right 
 to decide the case. They avoided even considering 
 it, but took a short cut towards disposing of the mat- 
 ter by denying the genuiness of the decree, charging 
 Wilfrid with bribery and imposture. For these high 
 crimes and misdemeanors the civil authorities Ben- 
 
 [149] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 tenced him to nine months imprisonment to be fol- 
 lowed by banishment. As Mr. Hole has it, ' ' No blame 
 of the Pope is expressed, but only of Wilfrid, whose 
 attempt to browbeat the indignant thanes in the 
 Pope 's name was probably the great and sole occasion 
 of their anger. Such was the resistance which the 
 first act of ultramontanism encountered among the 
 Anglo-Saxons." ('*A Manual of English Church 
 History.") 
 
 Mr. Hole also raises a question as to the Contents 
 of the Papal Letters because "the historian gives 
 no text,'' and the only historian here is Wilfrid's 
 biographer and biased partizan, Eddi. But, taking 
 the Letters as genuine, their censure of Theodore was 
 not very severe. ''Their decision," says Dr. Alfred 
 Plummer, ''was a very wise one. Wilfrid had been 
 irregularly deprived of the greater part of his diocese, 
 and the bishops who had been violently intruded must 
 be expelled. But — Theodore had done the right thing, 
 though he had done it in the wrong way. Wilfrid 
 must hold a council at York, and with the council's 
 concurrence select bishops to assist him. He must 
 choose men with whom he could work peaceably, and 
 then present them to Theodore to be consecrated. 
 Thus each side got what was essential — ^Wilfrid tha:t 
 his rights as Bishop of York should be respected; 
 Theodore that so large a diocese should have more 
 than one bishop." ("The Churches in Britain be- 
 fore A. D. 1000.") 
 
 Wilfrid's lack of patriotism and loyalty to his own 
 Nation and Church was punished by the loss of the 
 
 [150] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 See of York, by imprisonment for nine months, fol- 
 lowed by banishment. It was after this banishment 
 that he devoted six years of heroic and successful 
 service to the conversion of the Sussex barbarians, and 
 proved his Christian heroism. Defeat never daunted 
 him, nor made him idle nor despondent. It brought 
 out his best qualities. 
 
 Theodore, unmoved by the decision of Rome, proved 
 himself, though foreign-born, a loyal Englishman and 
 Churchman, like Archbishop Langton of a later day, 
 and went calmly on with his work of dividing up the 
 unwieldy diocese of Northumbria, making a new Bee 
 now as far north as the firth of Forth. He was not 
 minded to be a mere Roman Legate, but set the exam- 
 ple of ignoring Papal interference with the rights of 
 the English Church and Nation which distinguished 
 England for centuries to come. With all due and 
 even devout deference for the Apostolic See, which 
 had sent him hither, the Archbishop of the English 
 would attend to his own business and rule his own 
 suffragans. 
 
 It is gratifying to know that Theodore and "Wilfrid 
 were subsequently reconciled, and that the Archbishop, 
 softened by his approaching end, used all his in- 
 fluenced to repair the wrong done to Wilfrid. He 
 was too good and great a man not to show his appre- 
 ciation of that prelate's splendid services in Sussex 
 by opening the way for his restoration to a great part 
 of his original bishopric. The death of King Egfrid 
 and other changes in Northumbria gave the oppor- 
 tunity for Wilfrid's return. At Theodore's request, 
 
 [151] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 the new King, Aldfrid, restored Wilfrid to the See 
 of York, much diminished in size, and to the monastery 
 at Ripon. During a vacancy in the new Sees of Hex- 
 ham and Lindisfarne, he had charge also of those. 
 Thus, temporarily at least, Wilfrid regained a great 
 part of his former prestige. 
 
 Theodore died September 19th, 690, aged eighty- 
 eight. On his tomb at Canterbury, Bede, tells us, 
 was engraven an epitaph of thirty-four verses, but 
 it has been well said that Bede himself surpasses 
 all that they may have said by his simple testimony, 
 ''In his Episcopate the English Churches received 
 more spiritual benefit than they could ever gain 
 before his time.'* 
 
 Few men were more competent than the late 
 Bishop Stubbs of Oxford to sum up the signal ser- 
 vices of this great archbishop: — "It is difficult, if 
 not impossible," he says, '*to overstate the debt 
 which England, Europe, and Christian civilization 
 owe to the work of Theodore. He was the real or- 
 ganizer of the administrative system of the English 
 Church, and in that work laid the foundation of 
 National unity. He brought the learning and cul- 
 ture of the Eastern Empire into the West, and, 
 with the aid of Hadrian and Benedict Bishop, es- 
 tablished schools from which the scholars and mis- 
 sionaries of the following century went out to 
 rekindle the light of Christian culture in France 
 and the recently converted parts of Germany; and 
 thus formed a most important link between ancient 
 and modern life; his culture was for the time 
 
 [152] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 enlightened and tolerant, and, although he has never 
 been canonized, or even beatified, both his character 
 and his work seem to place him among the first and 
 greatest of the saints whom God has used for the 
 building up of the Church and development of the 
 culture of the world.'* (''Dictionary of Christian 
 Biography.") After Theodore's death (at which 
 Wilfrid was probably not the chief mourner) 
 that wilful man broke loose again. Failing to 
 profit by his humiliating experiences, he brought 
 upon himself the same troubles all over again — 
 which shows that Theodore had not been the chief 
 offender. Wilfrid and King Alfrid, successor of 
 Egfrid, soon quarreled about his rights and digni- 
 ties. The case went against the bishop in England. 
 Again he appealed to Rome, and Pope Sergius took 
 his part. Aldfrid, like his predecessor, would 
 brook no papal interference in his kingdom. The 
 new Archbishop Bertwald sided with the King and 
 his Witan, Wilfrid's claims and the Pope's together 
 were rejected by a great national synod of the whole 
 Church at Easterfield in 702, and Wilfrid was de- 
 posed. Again he journeyed to Rome, at the age of 
 seventy, and another pope, John VI, pronounced in 
 his favor^ and again the papal decree fell flat in 
 England, and Wilfrid was in greater disfavor than 
 ever. Finally, after the death of King Aldfrid, a 
 compromise was effected in a Northumbrian local 
 synod on the banks of the river Nidd in 705, and 
 Wilfrid was limited until his death in 709, to the 
 bishopric of Hexam and his old monastery at Ripon — 
 
 [153] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 John of Beverley being promoted from Hexham to 
 the more important one of York. His later appeals 
 to Rome — his Romo-mania — only served to lose him 
 the dignified position which Theodore had gained 
 for him as bishop of the wealthy and historic See 
 of York. **Let ns hope," says Bright, ''that the 
 once fiery and imperial spirit of "Wilfrid, bent and 
 chastened by age and troubles, was content with the 
 prospect of grief and peace in exchange for the 
 hope of ascendancy." 
 
 The Rev. M. W. Patterson, in his recent ** History 
 of the Church of England," has well summed up 
 his character: — *'In 709 Wilfrid died. If his career 
 is analysed, it will be seen that the cause of his 
 many troubles was his opposition to national senti- 
 ment and his overbearing, unconciliating temper. 
 He had the characteristic Roman lust for ecclesias- 
 tical domination; his haughty temper could not 
 brook opposition. Humble and lowly in his own 
 private life, he was bent on magnifying his ecclesi- 
 astical office and the claims of Rome. He was the 
 fore-runner of Thomas Becket. Yet with all this 
 he was full of love for the poor, a zealous missionary 
 to the heathen, eager to win souls for Christ. His 
 was a mixed nature, of a type that has often been 
 found in ecclesiastics." 
 
 Wilfrid, by his brilliant and versatile, but erratic, 
 genius; and Theodore by his calm, orderly common 
 sense, by his clear-headed and hard-headed talents 
 for organization, — each contributed much to the 
 making of the Church of the English race. Even 
 
 [154] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 their tremendous conflict was overruled to serve a 
 good purpose. It did more than almost anything 
 else to develop a National spirit in State and Church, 
 to call forth in each the love of independence and 
 self-government, and the spirit of resistance to for- 
 eign domination. 
 
 Exactly how Wilfrid lost his preeminent prestige 
 and popularity in Northumbria we do not know. 
 Nor are we likely ever to know, since the most 
 competent historians, ancient and modern, who have 
 sifted all the *' sources" and weighed all the evid- 
 ence in the case, have not been able to bring in a 
 verdict. The jury cannot agree. 
 
 Bede must have known all the facts, but he would 
 not tell. He tells us too little, and Eddi tells entirely 
 too much, and of too biased a character. The ice 
 was doubtless very thin in some places, and Bede 
 kept away from these, while Eddi (not seeing the 
 sign, '^Danger," which Bede had put up), went in 
 over his head. Bede's account is simply this, 
 ''There arose a dissension between the King Egfrid 
 and the most reverend Bishop Wilfrid, and the 
 bishop was driven from his see, and two bishops put 
 in his place." Wilfrid was evidently a genius and 
 highly accomplished, but of most imperious spirit 
 and vaulting ambition, with his eye probably on an 
 Archbishopric for himself at York — which came, 
 indeed, to that great see later, but not until about 
 twenty-five years after Wilfrid's death. We are 
 told, often, that there were "charges" against him, 
 but we are not told exactly what the charges were. 
 
 [155] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 No crimes are charged against him — there was no 
 question af faith or morals involved. But the prob- 
 abilities are that his unique and commanding per- 
 sonality, and the vast power and wealth under his 
 control made him a formidable rival to both King 
 and Archbishop, and a constant menace to the peace 
 of both State and Church. Egfrid found Wilfrid's 
 pastoral staff overshadowing his own sceptre, and 
 also a rival to the Primate's Pall. It was necessary 
 to the rule of both that his vast power and wealth 
 should be diminished and his immense diocese di- 
 vided into several. Why should he alone be an ex- 
 ception to Bede's broad statements: ''Theodore was 
 the first archbishop whom all the English Church 
 obeyed," and "Theodore visiting all parts, ordained 
 bishops in proper places, and, with their assistance, 
 corrected such things as he found faulty.' ' Here was 
 something "faulty," which King and Archbishop, in 
 4he interest of the Common Weal, in behalf of the 
 best interest and unity of both State and Church, 
 combined to correct. The King seems to have played 
 the most conspicuous part, and to have done the 
 most talking (with the voluble young queen's assis- 
 tance) ; but the grand old man, Theodore, grim, 
 and solemn and silent, was "the man behind the 
 guns." He was wise enough to know that there is 
 a time to keep silence. He had already managed to 
 lose his hearing sufficiently to turn a deaf ear to Rome, 
 and now he was dumb also. 
 
 Where Theodore had found seven bishoprics in 
 England he left seventeen — about the same number 
 
 [156] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 that Henry VIII found at his accession to the throne. 
 No fewer than twenty-one bishops were consecrated 
 by him in twenty-two years. He made the Diocesan 
 system of the English Church virtually what it has 
 continued to be ever since, except that he more wisely 
 (certainly for his own times) centred it in one Met- 
 ropolitan See, instead of two, as proposed by St. 
 Gregory. And his Diocesan system, following the 
 tribal divisions of each kingdom, laid the foundation 
 and prepared the way for the English Parochial 
 system, which was slowly developed through the 
 succeeding centuries into what it has long been. 
 Just as the Bishop, whom he found little more than 
 a royal chaplain and chief missionary for each king- 
 dom, became the responsible head of a territorial 
 diocese, so the chaplain of some thegn or large land- 
 holder, gradually became the settled Priest for that 
 holding and its people. Its territory became his 
 Parish, for which he was responsible as the Parson 
 (persona ecclesiae). Bede notices at least the begin- 
 nings of such rural churches and local clergy. Theo- 
 dore had been familiar with the **paroichia" in the 
 Eastern Empire as the local ecclesiastical centre, 
 and may well have desired an adaptation of his 
 native system which fitted in so admirably with 
 the Teutonic Township. The term **paroichia" was 
 of varying signification in the early Church, but 
 it finally denoted simply the country communities. 
 The change from roving monks, preaching at rude 
 mission-stations, to a resident parochial clergy was 
 brought about by encouraging the nobleman to build 
 
 [157] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 a church on his estate, or in his township, to endow 
 it with lands and tithes, having the right of appoint- 
 ing the parish priest. That is the English Parish 
 system which was slowly evolved out of the Arch- 
 bishop's effective organization of the Anglo-Saxon 
 Church . 
 
 Look now at other practical achievements and 
 their beneficent results, — especially in the notable 
 fields of Education, and of Missionary enterprise. 
 Even the best organized Church would be of little 
 worth without a godly and well-learned clergy. 
 Theodore did much to promote the cause of better 
 Education. It would be long before England would 
 have such a parochial clergy as would enable her to 
 dispense with the monasteries, which were the chief 
 centres both of learning and of missionary work 
 with both the Keltic and the Roman evangelists. 
 The growth of Monasteries under Theodore was 
 very considerable, — including such important ones 
 as Peterborough, Ely, Malmesbury, Abington, and 
 the refounding of the old British establishment at 
 Glastonbury. "Wilfrid also had done much in this 
 direction. But Benedict Bishop was now the great 
 leader in building and developing the best side of 
 monastic life. He had come back to England with 
 Theodore from Rome, and had taken charge of the 
 monastery at Canterbury until Hadrian, another 
 expert and the archbishop's closest colleague, was 
 ready to devote the rest of his life to this establish- 
 ment. It was Biscop who afterwards built Jarrow 
 and Wearmouth in the North, and enriched them 
 
 [158] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 with the rare literary and artistic treasures which 
 he had gathered in five visits to Rome and other 
 centres of culture. But Theodore himself had a 
 large share in the promotion of Schools, monastic 
 and other. Combining in himself both Eastern and 
 Western learning, this great leader did much to- 
 wards diverting the later monastic life of the Scots 
 from morbid seclusion and extravagant ascetisism 
 into healthier and more serviceable channels, mak- 
 ing the monasteries centres of study and scholarship 
 for clergy and laity. He took a personal part in the 
 teaching at Canterbury, where he and Hadriaii 
 created something like a University for higher edu- 
 cation, which furnished the model for similar Schools 
 at York and elsewhere. Among his pupils were 
 John of Beverley, afterwards bishop of Hexham 
 and later of York, — and Aldhelm, soon to be consid- 
 ered one of the first scholars of his day in England, 
 afterwards the saintly Abbot of Malmesbury and 
 first Bishop of Sherborne. Each of these scholars of 
 Professor Theodore has told a good story of their 
 illustrious teacher. We are told by John that Theo- 
 dore lectured sometimes on Medicine. On this sub- 
 ject, however, he can hardly be counted a very high 
 authority. "Nobody knows it all, not even the 
 youngest" (nor yet the oldest). And, as Professor 
 of Materia Medica, the Primate left something to be 
 desired. For John of Beverley quoted a maxim of 
 his, that "it was dangerous to bleed a patient when 
 moon and tide were waxing," and also expressed 
 his belief that "hare's flesh was good for dysentery." 
 
 [159] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 Aldhelm wrote a letter to a friend which shows that 
 more vigorous remedies were applied in the case of 
 some obstreperous Irish students who badgered the 
 elderly philosopher. ''He treated them," we are 
 told, '*as the truculent boar treats the Molossian 
 hounds. He tore them with the tusk of Grammar, 
 and shot them with the deep and sharp syllogisms of 
 Chronography, till they cast away their weapons, 
 and hurriedly fled to the recesses of their dens. ' ' 
 
 ''Forasmuch," says Bede of Theodore and Had- 
 rian, "as both of them were well read both in sacred 
 and in secular literature, they gathered a crowd of 
 disciples, and there daily flowed from them rivers 
 of knowledge to water the hearts of their hearers; 
 and, together with the books of Holy Writ, they also 
 taught them the arts of ecclesiastical poetry, astron- 
 omy and arithmetic. A testimony of which is, that 
 there are still living at this day some of their 
 scholars who are as well versed in the Greek and 
 Latin tongues as in their own in which they were 
 born. Nor were there ever happier days since the 
 English came into Britain." 
 
 Few of us, I think, are aware of the Literary 
 accumulations in Great Britain at this period, and 
 of the Educational influences which afterwards 
 went forth into Europe from a real revival of learn- 
 ing here. In his recent valuable "Commentaries on 
 the History of England," Professor Burrows has 
 the following statement: "Bede owed his remarka- 
 ble education not only to the Keltic stock of learning 
 concentrated at J arrow, and to the importations 
 
 [160] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 of Wilfrid and Biscop from Rome, but also to the 
 labors of Theodore and Hadrian. It is not too 
 much to say that in this way the British Isles became 
 the repository of the literary stores which had been 
 swept off the barbarized Continent during the Dark 
 Ages; and then the medium by which they were re- 
 stored to the world. In Ireland, in Scotland, in 
 Northumbria, and in Kent, the ancient accumula- 
 tions, destroyed elsewhere, were safely treasured up 
 for future use, and were ready to be dispersed 
 again when Charles the Great reduced Europe to 
 order. Then came once more the turn of the Con- 
 tinent, when Charles' tutor, the Northumbrian Al- 
 cuin (born in the year in which Bede died, and 
 educated in the school at York), who had gathered 
 up into himself the whole harvest of English cultiva- 
 tion, became the chief agent of the great Emperor 
 in the education of Europe. . . . When England, 
 ruined and laid waste (bj^ the Danes), rallied from 
 crushing disaster, it was fain to import from abroad 
 the pupils of the men w^hom it had formerly sent 
 forth. Who could have foreseen that, amidst the 
 decay of moribund civilizations, the replenishing 
 agency, like the supply of electric fluid to exhausted 
 atmospheres, should always be ready at hand to 
 repair the waste?" 
 
 If Caedmon w^as the father of English Poetry, 
 Bede was the father of English History, and indeed 
 of English Literature — the man in whom "the whole 
 learning of an age seemed to be summed up." In 
 his Epitaph at Durham he is styled, ''An English- 
 
 [161] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 man, born in an obscure corner of the world, who by 
 his knowledge enlightened the whole universe — who 
 searched the treasures of all divine and human 
 learning." To him, more than all others together, 
 we are indebted for our knowledge of the Early 
 English Church during the first century and a 
 quarter of its existence. Making some allowance 
 for his Roman bias, and more for the credulity which 
 he shared with his age in regard to the Miraculous, 
 the venerable Bede stands unrivalled in his day as 
 *'the discoverer of the true scope and method of 
 an historian." There is little to record of a life 
 so singularly uneventful, and yet so extremely fruit- 
 ful. His whole life from the year 675 to 735 was 
 spent on the estate on which he was born, and which 
 was given by King Egbert of Northumbria to Bene- 
 dict Biscop for the twin monasteries of Wearmouth 
 and Jarrow. At the age of seven Bede was handed 
 over to Biscop, and spent the rest of his life in one 
 or other of these united monasteries — ^mostly at 
 Jarrow. He was ordained Deacon at the age of 
 nineteen, and Priest at thirty by John of Beverley, 
 Bishop of Hexham, and there is no evidence that 
 he ever travelled further than to York, which 
 was quite unlike our New York. But under Biscop 
 and his successor Ceolfrith at Jarrow, the ecclesias- 
 tical historian of the English people enjoyed here 
 for his purposes what Bishop Stubbs calls ** advant- 
 ages which could not perhaps have been found any 
 where else in Europe at the time; perfect access to 
 all the existing sources of learning in the West. 
 
 [162] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 Nowhere else could he acquire at once the Irish, the 
 Roman, the Galilean, and the Canterbury learning; 
 the accumulated stores of books which Benedict had 
 bought at Rome, and at Vienne; or the disciplinary 
 instruction drawn from the monasteries of the Con- 
 tinent, as well as from the Irish missionaries." His 
 studies and writings were almost encyclopaedic, 
 covering well nigh every subject known to his day. 
 He left behind him forty-five or more books, '* includ- 
 ing scores of commentaries on the Scriptures com- 
 piled from the Christian Fathers, translations of the 
 Bible and Liturgy into the vulgar tongues, a book 
 upon the Saints and Martyrs, biographies of his 
 contemporaries, treatises on orthography, astron- 
 omy, rhetoric, poetry, etc." Besides his written 
 books, he carried on an extensive correspondence 
 with persons throughout the Heptarchy and at 
 Rome, from whom he got valuable local information 
 at first hand. Of all his books, however, the ''Eccle- 
 siastical History" is his masterpiece. His whole 
 monotonous, but happy life, was spent in learning, 
 teaching, writing, the devotions and labors of a 
 monk. "I ever found it sweet," he says, "to learu 
 or to teach or to write," yet he delighted to leave 
 his books whenever the monastery bell summoned 
 him to the daily devotions, "dreading," he said, 
 "lest the angels who hovered there might have to 
 ask, 'where is Bede? Why comes he not with the 
 brethren to the appointed prayers?' " — (a question 
 which the angels might well ask at more modem 
 seats of learning.) And so this good man's schol- 
 
 [163] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 arly life was ' * full of sweetness and light " up to the 
 end — his path ''as the shining light which shineth 
 more and more unto the perfect day." That Light 
 did not fail him ''at Eventide." 
 
 Cuthbert, a fellow-monk, who describes his death, 
 tells us how greatly he desired to finish his last 
 book, a translation of St. John's Gospel into English. 
 At last his boy-scribe Wilbert cried to the dying 
 saint and scholar, "Dear Master, there is only one 
 sentence more not written down." "It is well," 
 he answered, "write it." In a little while the boy 
 said, "Now it is finished." He answered, "It is 
 well, thou hast said the truth; it is finished; Take 
 my head in thy hands, for I love to look on my holy 
 place, where I have been wont to pray, and would 
 call once more on my Father," Then, as he lay on 
 the floor of his cell, he chanted the "Gloria Patri," 
 and so breathed out his serene soul to God ! 
 
 None can doubt in his case the fulfilment of the 
 beautiful prayer with which he closes his Ecclesias- 
 tical History: "And I beseech Thee, good Jesu, 
 to grant to me, to whom Thou hast given to drink 
 in with delight the words of Thy knowledge, that 
 through Thy goodness I may at length attain unto 
 Thee the Fountain of all wisdom, and appear forever 
 before Thy Face. Amen ! ' ' 
 
 Even more notable and honorable than the Edu- 
 cational work of the English Church, after its organ- 
 ization by Theodore, was its glorious Missionary 
 Workf not only at home, but abroad — its Foreign 
 Missions. The Evangelizing spirit of the Church 
 
 [164] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 had not been quenched by the withdrawal, or over- 
 shadowing of the Scots, who had kindled it in Eng- 
 land at the same time that they were sending such 
 missionaries as Columbanus and Gallus to Gaul and 
 Switzerland, The Scotch-Irish Missionaries had 
 their worthy successors among the English now, who 
 were seized with the desire to convert their heathen 
 kinsmen on the Continent; and their extraordinary 
 success was largely due to the fact that they com- 
 bined the Evangelizing power of the Scots with the 
 Organizing power of Rome. Out of Wilfrid's mon- 
 astery at Ripon came a Northumbrian youth, who, 
 after drinking in also the Irish learning and zeal, 
 undertook the work of evangelizing the Frisians, 
 which his old Master Wilfrid himself had inaugur- 
 ated. In the spirit and after the example of St. 
 Columba of lona, Willibrord with twelve com- 
 panions landed at the mouth of the Rhine in the year 
 690, and labored with such signal success among the 
 Frisians of Pipin Heristal's dominions that the Pope 
 made him Archbishop of Utrecht. One of his com- 
 panions, from England also, Swidbert was conse- 
 crated by Wilfrid of York as the first missionary 
 bishop consecrated and sent from the English 
 Church. In 719 Willibrord was joined in Frisia by 
 an Englishman from Wessex, Winfrid of Crediton, 
 who then entered upon one of the most extraordin- 
 ary and far-reaching missionary careers in the whole 
 history of Christianity. Under his new name of 
 Boniface, Winfrid became the great Missionary 
 Bishop of Germany and Archbishop of Maintz. He 
 
 [165] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 brought over to Germany many English monks and 
 nuns to reinforce him in his vast fields, and several 
 of them became bishops under him. St. Boniface 
 was the equal of St. Columba as an indefatigable 
 and successful missionary. He was the equal, if not 
 the superior, of Theodore as an organizer and an 
 ecclesiastical statesman. Unlike both, he was an 
 uncompromising Papist, because the Papacy, as then 
 constituted, seemed to him, under the conditions 
 then existing in Western Europe, the only power 
 that could could save Continental Europe from 
 chaos, Willibrord and Winfrid (Boniface) paid 
 back to the Pope the debt which England owed the 
 Roman See for the sending of Augustine to found 
 the English Church, and sending Theodore to or- 
 ganize it into the National Church of the English 
 race. Boniface both evangelized the Germans and or- 
 ganized them into a powerful Church. He also re- 
 formed and reorganized the almost effete Church of 
 the Franks in Gaul. In Gaul, as in England, the 
 Scotch-Irish could missionize, but could not organ- 
 ize. 
 
 At the age of seventy Boniface laid aside his Met- 
 ropolitan dignity to return to his first-love, to 
 resume his missionary labors among the ferocious 
 Frisians, who put him to a cruel death. There in the 
 year 755 he completed his splendid career with the 
 martyr's crown. Thus the Frankish and German 
 nations were indebted to the English Church for 
 the revival both of religion and learning — for 
 
 [166] 
 
THE COMING OF THEODORE 
 
 Boniface and Alcuin, the two foremost men of that 
 age in Europe except Charles the Great. 
 
 ''And it was by Anglo-Saxon missionaries from 
 the seventh to the eleventh centuries," says Bishop 
 Stubbs, ''that Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway 
 and Iceland were converted to the Gospel." (''Lec- 
 tures on Early English History.") 
 
 [167] 
 
VI 
 
 The Coming of the Danes, and the Ruin and 
 Revival of the English Church 
 
 During the course of the century and a half that 
 followed the death of Archbishop Theodore both 
 State and Church passed through vicissitudes many 
 and various, culminating in the Coming of the 
 Danes, and the commencement of the greatest crisis 
 that the British Isles had known since the Coming 
 of the English. We have seen what glorious achieve- 
 ments Christianity had accomplished in the century 
 between the Coming of Augustine and the Passing 
 bf Theodore. Slowly but surely it had won from 
 heathenism all the kingdoms of the Heptarchy. Then 
 we see the Heptarchy, slowly but surely, also becom- 
 ing a Triarchy — the dominant kingdoms of North- 
 umbria, Mercia, and Wessex annexing or controlling 
 the other kingdoms, and each of the three struggling 
 for the mastery. The Overlordship had passed from 
 Kent to Northumbria, from Northumbria to Mercia, 
 from Mercia to Wessex, where it was to remain per- 
 manently in the line of Egbert until the Triarchy 
 had become a Monarchy, and the English peoples 
 gradually merged into one nation. The process by 
 which this came to pass was, briefly, as follows: — 
 Egbert became King of Wessex in 802, after an exile 
 of thirteen years spent at the Court of Charlemagne, 
 
 [168] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 where he probably saw the Imperial crown of the 
 Caesar's placed upon the head of Charles the Great 
 by Pope Leo III, on the famous Christmas-day of the 
 year 800. Here, doubtless, the West Saxon King 
 had been fired with the ambition to become sole 
 sovereign of all England. In about thirty years he 
 had conquered the British Kingdom of West Wales, 
 or Cornwall down to Land's End; had followed this 
 up by his victory at Ellandun where he had won 
 the Kingdom of Mercia. Shortly afterwards Sussex 
 and Essex submitted to his sway, and then Kent, 
 where Ethelwulf, his son, father of Alfred, was made 
 sub-king. Egbert's conquests culminated in 831, 
 by the submission of Northumbria, and he was 
 acknowledged as supreme over all the kingdoms of 
 the English, so that this date is sometimes reckoned 
 as "the birth-year of this Monarchy." It should be 
 added, however, that this new-born monarchy in the 
 House of Egbert of Wessex was not really full- 
 grown until the reign of Athelstan the Glorious 
 (924-941) grandson of Alfred the Great, who was 
 grandson of Egbert. 
 
 And what was the cohesive power, the centralizing 
 and unifying power behind this movement for the 
 Making of one English Nation? What but the Mak- 
 ing one English Church, which preceded it by at 
 least 150 years, and prepared the way for it, setting 
 the example, and giving the inspiration thereto? It 
 would be easy enough to multiply proofs of this 
 statement by quoting many of the best historians. 
 Time will allow me to quote only a few, and I select 
 
 [169] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND 
 
 those whicli we use in our Senior Class, In his 
 ''History of the English Church from its Foundation 
 to the Norman Conquest/* Hunt declares, — **In this 
 making of England, the Church of England bore a 
 signal part. Amid the divisions and struggles of the 
 Heptarchic period, the Church alone represented the 
 idea of Unity. It was the Church of all the kingdoms, 
 and of none of them exclusively; it was not the 
 Church of Kent, or of Mercia, or of Wessex, but of 
 the English nation. Each kingdom had its own leg- 
 islative assembly; the Church alone had assemblies 
 gathered from every kingdom. A layman of one 
 kingdom was a stranger, perhaps an enemy, in an- 
 other; a churchman was at home in all. Bishops 
 were not necessarily natives of the kingdoms in 
 which their dioceses lay. . . . Thus the Church fore- 
 shadowed and set an example of a unity which was 
 gradually attained by the nation.'* 
 
 Mr. M. W. Patterson, in his *' History of the 
 Church of England," says, ''The Church of England 
 is not, and never has been, a State Church. She ex- 
 isted in these islands long before there was a united 
 State of England. She drew her credentials from 
 our Lord Himself, her frame of government from 
 the the Apostolic Church. The State did not estab- 
 lish the Church; it would be more true to say that 
 the Church established the State.*' 
 
 Dr. Alfred Plummer, in his "Churches in Britain 
 before A. D. 1000," says, "Theodore created a 
 United Church, which became in quite a marvellous 
 degree a National Church. . . . The unity of the 
 
 [170] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 Church became the foundation, the model, and the 
 chief cause of the unity of the nation. ... It was 
 the English Church which was the substitute for a 
 United Nation, and which led to an English Nation 
 being at last formed.*' 
 
 But, I must pass more directly to the special sub- 
 ject of this particular lecture. We have already 
 seen how the various distinct agencies in the con- 
 version of the English, viz. : Italian, Keltic, Burgun- 
 dian and Frankish had been welded together into 
 one National Church, with provinces, dioceses, and 
 the beginning of parishes, with monasteries and 
 schools, sjmods and conferences. Amid all the con- 
 fusion and strife and changes in the kingdoms, the 
 Church of the English had become the one united 
 and stable organization to set the example and lead 
 the way to English National Unity. "It could weld 
 together,'' says Wakeman, ''into one stable fabric 
 the ill-assorted elements of Roman and Keltic Chris- 
 tianity, keeping and utilizing with rare skill the best 
 of both systems. It could take the lead in the noble 
 work of the conversion of the German tribes (on the 
 Continent) of similar blood. It could teach English- 
 men to feel, act, and think as members of one society 
 in the unity of the Catholic Church. The primary 
 duty now before the Church became no longer to 
 win but to train, no longer to establish but to de- 
 velop, no longer to call for great sacrifices and 
 heroic resolutions, but to demand the steady, painful, 
 daily building up of character through the replace- 
 
 [171] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 ment of heathen license by Christian discipline. In 
 such days the rough, coarse, passionate nature of 
 our old English forefathers began to reassert itself, 
 and the barbarian burst through the web of civiliza- 
 tion which Christianity had woven round him." 
 
 The first hundred and fifty years of the life of the 
 English Church has been called its ''Golden Age," 
 because then it appeared as its best, both at home 
 and abroad, in unitj^ of organization and spirituality 
 of life, in its leaders of learning and of missionary 
 zeal. But before the death of Bede in 735, whose 
 unique narrative we lose now for the rest of our story, 
 he sees signs of increasing degeneracy and decay. He 
 writes to Egbert, the Archbishop of York, deploring 
 the relapse from a higher standard, and urging the 
 crying need of revival and vigorous reforms. Boni- 
 face, too, the English Winfrid and the great Apostle 
 of Germany, writes back to his native Church in 
 terms of severest censure, calling for a council to 
 deal promptly and sternly with the moral corrup- 
 tion of his beloved England. Nor did the English 
 Alcuin, the famous scholar and former head of the 
 school at York, now at the Court of Charlemagne, 
 forget to write many letters to the same effect. The 
 monasteries, intended as centres of learning, dis- 
 cipline and missionary zeal, were, in some cases, be- 
 coming the homes of idleness and laxity, of luxury 
 and even of vice. The genuine, if mistaken, devo- 
 tion, which had led kings, queens and nobles into 
 these calm retreats of saintly living, had come to 
 make monastic life a fashionable fad for princes and 
 
 [172] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 princesses who carried their worldly ways into the 
 religious houses, and into the popular pilgrimages 
 to Rome, making both a by-word of reproach. Boni- 
 face pictures the frivolity and bad repute of English 
 ladies on their way to and from the city which held 
 the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul ; and Pope Zach- 
 ary demands that the bishops deal promptly with the 
 laxity and sin of clergy and people. Accordingly 
 the provincial Synod of Cloveshoo in 747 legislated 
 against religious ladies that used skill in needle- 
 work for the adornment of their own persons rather 
 than of God's altars. Pseudo-monasteries must 
 cease to be places of gossip, feasting and drinking, 
 the resorts of minstrels, musicians and buffoons. 
 Monks must no longer be allowed the national vice 
 of excessive drinking, especially of '' rising up early 
 to follow strong drink." Other canons were passed 
 prescribing greater care in ordaining fit men for the 
 sacred ministry, and stricter regulation of the lives 
 of the clergy, regulars and seculars. Worldly em- 
 ployments must cease on the Lord's day, the people 
 must be taught the Creed, the Lord's Prayer and 
 the Ten Commandments, the Services for Baptism 
 and Holy Communion in their own tongue. 
 
 Meanwhile Theodore 's policy of unity of organiza- 
 tion under one Archbishop of Canterbury was changed 
 for the worse by the creation of two additional arch- 
 bishoprics, and rivalry which arose between them. In 
 735 Egbert, brother of the Northumbrian King, was 
 made first Archbishop of York, and a most worthy 
 one he proved. When the great Mercian King Offa, 
 
 [173] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 the intimate friend of Charlemagne, became over- 
 lord, he wished to consolidate his kingdom and to 
 mark its supremacy by setting up its own Arch- 
 bishopric at Lichfield. In order to give greater pres- 
 tige to the new Metropolitan See, Offa invited the 
 Pope Hadrian I. to erect it, which he did by sending 
 two Legates to hold provincial synods in England, 
 and at one of these at Chelsea in 787 Higbert, Bishop 
 of Lichfield, was made Archbishop and given the 
 larger part of the See of Canterbury. Fortunately 
 this action was reversed sixteen years later, and the 
 new Archbishopric was abolished. The national 
 character of the Church and its influence for encour- 
 aging national unity were endangered by this policy 
 of making new Metropolitan Sees as appendages to 
 political divisions. Still more threatening was the 
 introduction into England for the first time of Papal 
 Legates, although we hear no more of them until 
 the eve of the Norman Conquest. 
 
 Something more radical and arousing than the 
 visit of papal legates was needed to awaken the 
 English Church from moral and spiritual lethargy, 
 and we are now to hear of another kind of visitors. 
 The awakening came by the sword of the heathen, 
 and by a visitation similar to that which came to the 
 old British Church when the heathen English burst 
 upon them with fire and sword. From across the 
 North Sea in their broad-bottomed boats, and up all 
 the bays and creeks and rivers of England, began 
 to swarm the Vikings, Norwegians, Frisians and 
 Danes, to repeat what had been done on the same 
 
 [174] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 soil three hundred years before by the Angles, the 
 Saxons and the Jutes. Mr. Green gives us a vivid 
 picture of the coming of the Danes. — "The first 
 sight of the Northmen is as if the hand on the dial 
 of history had gone back three hundred years. The 
 Norwegian fiords, the Frisian sandbanks, poured 
 forth pirate fleets such as had swept the seas in the 
 days of Hengist and Cerdic. There was the same 
 wild panic as the black boats of the invaders struck 
 inland along the river reaches, or moored around 
 the river-islets, — the same sights of horror, firing 
 of homesteads, slaughter of men, women driven off 
 to slavery or shame, children tossed on pikes or sold 
 in the market-place, as when the English invaders 
 attacked Britain. Christian priests were again slain 
 at the altar by worshippers of Woden; letters, arts, 
 religion, government disappeared before these 
 Northmen as before the Northmen of old. But 
 when the wild burst of the storm was over, people, 
 government (Church) reappeared unchanged. Eng- 
 land still remained England; the conquerors sank 
 quietly into the mass of those around them; and 
 Woden yielded without struggle to Christ. The 
 secret of this difference between the two invasions 
 was that the battle was no longer between Briton 
 and German, between Englishman and Welshman, 
 between men of different races. The life of these 
 Northern folk was in the main the life of the earlier 
 Englishmen. Their customs, their religion, their 
 social order were the same as our English fore- 
 fathers had been; they were in fact kinsmen bring- 
 
 [175] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 ing back to an England that had forgotten its ori- 
 gins the barbaric England of its pirate forefathers. 
 Nowhere over Europe was the fight so fierce, be- 
 cause nowhere else were the combatants men of one 
 blood and one speech. But just for this reason the 
 fusion of the Northmen with their foes was nowhere 
 so peaceful and so complete." (''Short History of 
 the English people.") 
 
 The first appearance on English shores of the 
 coming storm from the North, that was to make the 
 whole heavens black with clouds and wind, was as 
 ''the arising of a little cloud out of the sea like a 
 man's hand." The "Anglo-Saxon Chronicle," 
 which, now that we have lost Bede, becomes our 
 chief source of information, records for the year 
 787 : ' ' This year first came three ships of Northmen 
 out of Haerethaland (Denmark) — These were the 
 first ships of Danishmen which sought the land of 
 the English nation." The next notice of the 
 "Chronicle" is more ominous, and more rhetorical: 
 — "793, this year dire fore-warnings came over the 
 land of the Northumbrians, and miserably terrified 
 the people; these were excessive whirlwinds and 
 lightnings; and fiery dragons (probably Zeppelins 
 or aeroplanes?) were seen flying in the air. . . . 
 A little after that, in the same year, the ravaging of 
 heathen men lamentably destroyed God's church at 
 Lindisfarne through rapine and slaughter." Again, 
 the record for 794 says: "And the heathens ravaged 
 among the Northumbrians, and plundered Egfert's 
 monastery at the mouth of the Wear" (Bede's old 
 
 [176] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 neighborhood). These are fair samples of what fol- 
 lowed for two hundred years, during which, more 
 and more, far and wide, ''the ravages of heathen 
 men lamentably destroyed God's Church" until 
 there was not a monastery and hardly a church left 
 standing in Northumbria. The same story is re- 
 peated in the other kingdoms. The Chronicle does 
 not mention the Northmen again till 832, when we 
 read: ''This year the heathen men ravaged Shep- 
 pey," (an island olff the coast of Kent — they are 
 moving Southward now). Meanwhile they have 
 spread themselves over the islands off the North 
 and West coasts of Scotland, destroying Columba's 
 famous monastery in 802, and later overrunning the 
 great part of Ireland. After the year 832 they came 
 every year for twenty years to England, each time ap- 
 pearing suddenly, and usually in a fresh place. 
 They made straight for the Church or the monas- 
 tery, where gold and silver and other treasures sat- 
 isfied their lust of plunder, and fire and sword satis- 
 fied their fanatical hatred of Christianity. They 
 regarded their English kinsmen as apostates from 
 the old religion of the Teutons (what the Kaiser 
 calls, "our old God"). They had a special antipathy 
 to the Christian religion which was ousting their 
 own. Besides the churches and monasteries, the few 
 English cities, Canterbury, Rochester, Winchester, 
 London and York were well-nigh destroyed. And 
 so the terrible work of the Danes went on through- 
 out the fair fields of England until "the land which 
 was as the Garden of Eden before them, behind them 
 
 [177] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 was a desolate wilderness." From the middle of the 
 ninth century it was no longer a mere succession of 
 raids for plunder and slaughter, but a steady invas- 
 ion from all sides for conquest and settlement, with 
 formidable armies and vast fleets and great kings at 
 the head of them. The Danes had come to stay 
 and to supplant the English. The pressure of the 
 increased population driven in upon their countries 
 by Charlemagne compelled them to seek a new home, 
 and they found one much to their liking during their 
 frequent visits to England. It was a delightful con- 
 trast to the bleak and barren and frigid regions 
 from which they came. Soon Northumbria and East 
 Anglia were theirs beyond recovery, then Mercia 
 was overwhelmed, giving them two-thirds of England. 
 Not until they attempted the conquest of Wessex did 
 they encounter a f oeman equal to the task of turning 
 the tide. Before this the English here and there, 
 and especially in Wessex under Egbert and his son, 
 Ethelwulf, had made a brave but spasmodic and 
 ineffectual resistance. They had ceased to be a 
 warlike people, and were ill prepared for defense 
 against a foreign foe. They had no organized army, 
 no navy at all. Kings and thegns, bishops and 
 abbots, at the head of such forces as they could hast- 
 ily gather, had fought and died for their homes and 
 their altars, their families and their country. King 
 Edmund of East Anglia had won the martyr's crown 
 by a death like that of St. Sebastian, tied to a tree 
 and shot through and through with arrows, because 
 
 [178] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 he would not renounce his religion to save his throne 
 or his life. 
 
 But at last God raised up in Alfred of Wessex a 
 peerless leader to shed an imperishable glory over 
 the English race. 
 
 Alfred, youngest son of King Ethelwulf and his 
 Queen Osburh, was born at Wantage in Berkshire 
 in 848. His father, who had long desired to make 
 a pilgrimage to Rome, gave this little son a pictur- 
 esque start towards greatness and royalty by send- 
 ing him at the age of four in the company of other 
 nobles to Rome, as the advance guard to announce 
 the King's own coming two years later. Pope Leo 
 IV. was so delighted with the attractive child that 
 he adopted him as a son, anointed him with oil, and 
 placed a crown upon his head. His father's visit 
 to Rome lasted a whole year, in which the King lav- 
 ished most costly gifts upon the Pope and prom- 
 ised a yearly offering — the forerunner of "Peter's 
 Pence. ' ' On his way home Ethelwulf visited the Em- 
 peror Charles the Bald, where he sealed his friend- 
 ship with the Frankish Count, and also sealed his 
 fate at home, and spoiled the dignity of both visits 
 abroad, by taking for his second wife Charles's 
 daughter, Edith, aged twelve. Charles, with an eye 
 to business rather than romance, had his daughter 
 crowned queen by the famous Archbishop Hincmar. 
 On the King's return to Wessex with his juvenile 
 queen, the Witan and the people were so indignant 
 at his folly that they "sent him in his resignation," 
 and put his own son Ethelbald on the throne. On 
 
 [179] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 his father's death two years later Ethelbald made 
 the scandal complete by marrying his father's 
 widow. Two years afterwards Edith, on the death 
 of her second husband, married her third, Baldwin, 
 Count of Flanders, and became thereby the ances- 
 tress of Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror — 
 whom we shall meet shortly on English soil repeat- 
 ing the performance of the Danes. Ethelwulf had 
 left four sons, each of whom had succeeded in turn 
 to the throne. Two died very early, leaving Ethel- 
 red as King when the Danes closed in upon Wessex 
 and penetrated to the very heart of it, to finish the 
 conquest of England. Ethelred, aided by his young- 
 est brother Alfred, made a brave resistance with 
 the balance of success against him, but managed to 
 hold their enemies in check for a while. After 
 Ethelred 's death, Alfred now King at twenty-two 
 years of age, led a forlorn hope with all odds against 
 him. During seven years of ceaseless conflict, his 
 resources seemed about exhausted, and it looked 
 as if England and the English Church would soon 
 share the fate of Britain and the British Church. 
 During the winter of 877-8 Wessex was in its last 
 ditch, and the young man who carried its fortunes 
 and all England 's in his hands was shut up in a rude 
 fort in the isle of Athelney, amid the marshes of the 
 river Parret, in worse plight than Washington at 
 Valley Forge. But, with the budding of Spring- 
 time, the fairest flower of all English manhood 
 began to bloom, and a career opened before the 
 world which has had no counterpart in English his- 
 
 [180] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 tory until our own Washington. There was hope 
 yet for a ruined country and church which could 
 produce Alfred the Great and the Good, who, how- 
 ever, was called by his English contemporaries, "Eng- 
 land's Darling." This was England's compensation 
 for the ravages of the heathen who "lamentably des- 
 troyed God's Church." 
 
 The stories of the "cakes" and the "harper's dis- 
 guise" tell us only of the occasional diversions of 
 Alfred during his hiding in the marshland. There 
 was more serious work going on in that fertile brain, 
 which was to bring forth abundant fruit in the 
 Revival of English State and Church. The organ- 
 izing of an army, and even the beginning of a navy 
 — of England's great sea-power — were the most 
 immediate results of the meditations that made the 
 King-in-disguise forget to turn the cakes. He was 
 getting ready to turn the tables on the Danes. And 
 soon the old "Chronicle" begins to change its mon- 
 otonous and melancholy tone for the year 878: 
 "Then in the seventh week after Easter the King 
 rode to Brixton on the east side of Selwood; and 
 there came to meet him all the men of Somerset, and 
 the men of Wiltshire, and that part of the men of 
 Hampshire which were on this side of the sea; and 
 they were joyful at his presence. On the following 
 day he went from that station to Iglea, and on the 
 day after this to Heddington, and there fought 
 against the w^hole army, put them to flight, and per- 
 sued them as far as their fortress; and there he sat 
 down fourteen days. And then their army delivered 
 [181] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 to him hostages, with many oaths that they would 
 leave his kingdom, and also promised him that their 
 King should receive baptism; and this accordingly 
 they fulfilled." This is the ''Anglo-Saxon Chroni- 
 cle's" simple narrative of one of the Decisive 
 Battles of the World at Ethandun, or Eddington, 
 and the Peace of Wedmore, followed by the Baptism 
 of Gu thrum, or Gorm, the Danish King, with King 
 Alfred for his sponsor. The after-results were the 
 Revival and restoration of the English Nation and 
 Church. It was the beginning, too, of the Conver- 
 sion and the Civilization of the Danes, and of their 
 peaceful amalgamation with the English race — to 
 the ultimate advantage of both parties. 
 
 By the Peace of Wedmore about one half of Eng- 
 land, already in secure possession of the Danes, was 
 conceded to them, on condition that they left the 
 rest undisturbed. The dividing line was the River 
 Thames up to London, and thence by the old ''Wat- 
 ling Street" road to Chester and the Irish Sea. 
 Thus the Danes got Northumbria, East Anglia, and 
 the eastern half of Mercia. Guthrum, the Danish 
 King, formally accepted the Christian religion, and 
 pledged himself to keep the peace and to cease 
 raiding and plundering. No better terms were 
 possible. It was too late to turn the Danes out of 
 the whole of England. The next best thing was to 
 keep them out of half of it, and confine them within 
 that part which now took the name of the Danelaw. 
 Here time and the influence of the English among 
 whom they dwelt, the influence of a higher civiliza- 
 
 [182] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 tion and purer religion might be trusted to make the 
 Danes what the English themselves had gradually 
 become. 
 
 And so Alfred turned his attention to the Regen- 
 eration of his own kingdom. Ten years of peace 
 were before him, and he made the most of them — 
 fifteen years, indeed, with the exception of one 
 short, successful struggle. **This will I say,'* he 
 declared, 'Hhat I have sought to live worthily the 
 while I lived, and after my life to leave to the men 
 that came after me a remembering of me in good 
 works.'' No nobler aim for a man's life was ever 
 more worthily fulfilled. War with the Danes was 
 not by any means over yet, and he took wise meas- 
 ures to meet the enemy prepared the next time, by 
 sea as well as land. But good fighter as the King 
 was, his achievements in peace were greater far than 
 his deeds as a warrior. The breathing spell now 
 allowed his kingdom was turned to the best account 
 in the Restoration of law and order and good govern- 
 ment — of education and sound learning, and most 
 of all, of religion, which he made the base of all. 
 "Whether w^e regard his laws, his police, his redivi- 
 sions of population, his reconstituted assemblies, his 
 creation of a navy, his management of the church, 
 his education of the clergy, of the upper classes, and 
 of the poor, the record is amazing." (Burrows.) 
 In each of these departments of reform Alfred ap- 
 pears, not as an original creative genius, but rather 
 as a man of practical common sense, who took the 
 best that was readiest to his hand, and adapted it 
 
 [183] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 to the immediate needs of his people. He codified 
 the Laws of his predecessors, selecting the most 
 righteous and the most workable, and made them a 
 national law for what was left of England. * ' Those 
 things," he says, ''which I met with, either of the 
 days of Ine, my kinsman, or of Offa, King of the 
 Mercians, or of Ethelbert, who first among the Eng- 
 lish race received baptism, those which seemed to 
 me rightest, those I have gathered, and rejected the 
 others." And few men have been better judges of 
 the "rightest" all around. Alfred's code opens 
 with the Ten Commandments, and sums them up 
 with the Golden Rule. These were the basis of his 
 laws, as of his own life. 
 
 If Alfred's Laws did more for England than his 
 wars, greater still and more lasting were his services 
 in behalf of Education and of Literature. He found 
 virtually nothing left of either of these in his own 
 kingdom. With the destruction of the monasteries, 
 went teachers, schools and books. As he declares, 
 ' ' So entirely has knowledge escaped from the English 
 people that there are only a few priests on this side 
 of the Humber who can understand the Divine Ser- 
 vice, or even explain a Latin Epistle in English 
 
 I cannot remember one south of the Thames when I 
 began to reign." And so, in his unsettled times he 
 set himself to provide that "at least every freeborn 
 youth should abide at his book till he can well under- 
 stand English writing. ' ' But the sword of the Danes 
 had left few competent teachers in England, which 
 had taken the lead heretofore. How was this lack to 
 
 [184] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 be supplied? '^ Formerly," writes Alfred, **men 
 came hither from foreign lands to seek for instruc- 
 tion, and now, when we desire it, we can only ob- 
 tain it from abroad." And so from Wales and 
 Western Mercia, which had suffered less from the 
 invaders, and then from Continental Europe the 
 King summoned learned teachers for the new schools 
 and monasteries which he founded — among them 
 Asser, a British monk from St. David's, who became 
 the King's intimate friend and adviser, and later 
 his biographer when he had settled down as bishop 
 of Sherborne. Plegmund, a hermit, in hiding from 
 the Danes on a lonely island near Chester, was 
 brought forth from obscurity to become ultimately 
 Archbishop of Canterbury for twenty-four years, 
 and so popular that the '^ Chronicle" for the year 
 890, says, "he was chosen of God and all the people 
 to be Archbishop of Canterbury." Besides these 
 two eminent finds from ''out West," from the 
 remoter regions of Mercia, came also Werfrith, 
 Bishop of Worcester, and Athelstan and Werwulf, 
 the King's chaplains. Two foreigners, at least, 
 were imported from the Continent; Grimbald from 
 St. Omer in Flanders and John of Old Saxony. 
 
 But at the head of all England's teachers in his 
 day, so far as permanent influence upon education 
 and letters is concerned, stands Alfred himself, — 
 first a learner in his court-school (like Charlemagne 
 in the similar school for nobles under the English 
 Alcuin), devoting eight hours of every twenty-four 
 to study, until the royal learner became competent, 
 
 [185] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 by the aid of his more learned colleagues, to do for 
 Literature what he had done for Laws. Alfred 
 took the best manuals of his time within his reach 
 (which in those days were all in Latin), and ren- 
 dered them into English. These he carefully edited, 
 and sometimes enriched by his own wise and, often 
 charming, prefaces and notes — which make the be- 
 ginning of English Prose. On this wise he dealt 
 with five famous books, which were translated out 
 of Latin into English — which meant then Anglo- 
 Saxon — as follows : — 
 
 I. The Liber Pastoralis, or *' Pastoral Care" of Pope 
 Gregory the Great translated by Alfred himself, 
 who sent a copy to every English bishop. Three 
 copies still survive. 
 
 n. Bede's ''Ecclesiastical History," still surviv- 
 ing in Anglo-Saxon. 
 
 ni. Orosius's ** History Against the Pagans," by 
 a Spanish priest, a contemporary and friend of St. 
 Augustine c.417, and, like the great bishop's book 
 ''The City of God," a Christian Apologetic. 
 
 IV. "Dialogues of Gregory the Great" — popular 
 narratives in aid of personal religion. 
 
 V. Boethius's "Consolations of Philosophy," 
 written by Boethius, a Roman Consul, imprisoned 
 and put to death c.524 by Theoderic, King of the 
 East Goths — Moral Meditations based principally 
 on Plato and Aristotle — not particularly Christian 
 in the original, but made so by Alfred in his trans- 
 lations, which emphasize the superior consolations 
 of the Christian Religion. "In all these works," it 
 
 [186] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 has been well said by Mr. Cruttwell (in his book 
 called, **The Saxon Church and the Norman Con- 
 quest") ''Alfred throws off the King and speaks 
 to the reader as man to man. But a still more strik- 
 ing proof of his genius is shown by his remodelling 
 of the old 'Chronicle' (from which I have fre- 
 quently quoted), which in his hands and for some 
 time after him (down to the middle of the twelfth cen- 
 tury), became the most authentic source of English 
 history. A bare annalistic record of public events 
 had existed in Wessex from the time of Birinus till 
 the death of Ine, written in Latin and known as 
 the Bishop's Roll. This had been revived under 
 Egbert, and considerably amplified by St. Swithun, 
 bishop of Winchester, who gathered together many 
 early traditions as well as materials for the history 
 of his own time. It was this Roll that now blossomed 
 out into a spirited original narrative, which gave 
 a wholly new power to the English tongue. There 
 can be little doubt that a large part of the Chronicle 
 for Alfred's reign was written by himself. The im- 
 pulse he thus gave bore fruit rapidly. Not only was 
 the Chronicle continued after his death, but an out- 
 burst of literary productiveness in the vernacular 
 ensued, wholly without parallel among Continental 
 nations, bearing witness to the inspiring power of 
 the King's example." 
 
 At the risk of wearying you, I cannot forbear to 
 add Mr. Green's statement of this in his remarka- 
 ble book on "The Conquest of England": — 
 
 "It is thus that in the Literatures of Modem 
 
 [187] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 Europe that of England leads the way. The Rom- 
 ance tongues — the tongues of Italy, France and 
 Spain — were only just emerging into definite exis- 
 tence when Alfred wrote None of the Ger- 
 man folk across the sea were to possess a prose liter- 
 ature of their own for centuries to come. English, 
 therefore, was not only the first Teutonic Literature 
 — it was the earliest prose literature of the modern 
 world. And at the outset of English literature 
 stands the figure of Alfred. The mighty roll of 
 books that fills our libraries opens with the transla- 
 tions of the King." 
 
 But the Revival of a ruined Church and of a well- 
 nigh ruined Religion was one of the best of all 
 Alfred's achievements, and indeed the basis of all 
 his reforms. He was a King who sought first the 
 Kingdom and Righteousness of God for himself and 
 for his people. Among clergy and laity alike the up- 
 heaval caused by the Danish invasion had wrought a 
 terrible deterioration in discipline and in character. 
 The meagre notices of Church affairs during these 
 troublous times do not furnish much material for 
 the ecclesiastical historian, but they show one shin- 
 ing mark in Alfred as a Church-Reformer — ''build- 
 ing the old wastes and repairing the breaches." 
 
 In addition to his Code of laws for his own people, 
 which, as we have seen, were intensely religious, — 
 as Over-lord of Guthrum the Danish King settled in 
 East Anglia, Alfred prepared a special code for 
 these Danish converts to Christianity. There would 
 be an immense work for the English Church for 
 
 [188] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 many a year in the Christianizing of this vast 
 heathen horde who had now become a permanent 
 part of the population. There would be need of 
 strenuous restraints upon this fierce and violent 
 race who had been nurtured in a savage paganism. 
 England, for the while, need not go to foreign parts 
 to convert the heathen. The home-supply would 
 be sufficient to occupy the missionaries for a while. 
 Alfred had to reconvert his own people in order that 
 they might help in the conversion of the Danes. We 
 find him taking prompt and vigorous measures to 
 replace the ruined monasteries. He founded three 
 himself — one for women at Shaftesbury, with his 
 own daughter Ethelgifj^ as Abbess, — and two for 
 men, one at Winchester, and another at Athelney in 
 memory of his awful winter there and the glad 
 springtime that brought deliverance. But one of his 
 most difficult tasks was to find Clergy of any educa- 
 tion for bishops, or abbots, or even parish priests. 
 Many had fallen under the sword of the Danes, and 
 many had fallen from grace. Alfred did the best he 
 could until his schools could furnish an educated and 
 godly ministry. Many sees must remain vacant until 
 competent men could be provided. But so fruitful 
 was the stimulus which the King gave to education 
 and learning and religion that a few years after his 
 death no less than seven bishops were consecrated 
 in one year (909). But, after all, the King's greatest 
 contribution to a revived church was his own per- 
 sonality, the example and influence of his own full- 
 orbed Christian character. "We have loved," he 
 
 [189] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 said, ''only the name of being Christians, and very 
 few our duties.^ ^ Alfred was the foremost of that 
 few in his day and country who both lived and did 
 his Christian duty to God and to man. His most 
 conspicuous quality was his absolute and unselfish 
 devotion to the service of his Lord and of his beloved 
 people. Like David, *'he fed them with a faithful 
 and true heart, and ruled them prudently with all 
 his power." — King Alfred, never of robust health, 
 died at the early age of fifty-two — ' ' one of the great- 
 est figures in the history of the World," says von 
 Ranke. The general consensus of the best histori- 
 ans as to his character finds fit expression in the 
 words of Freeman, ''Alfred is the most perfect char- 
 acter in history. . . . No other man on record has 
 ever so thoroughly united all the virtues both of the 
 ruler and of the private man. In no other man on 
 record were so many virtues disfigured by so little 
 alloy. A saint without superstition, a scholar with- 
 out ostentation, a warrior all whose wars were 
 fought in the defense of his country, a conqueror 
 whose laurels were never stained by cruelty, a prince 
 never cast down by adversity, never lifted up to in- 
 solence in the hour of triumph; there is no other 
 name in history to compare with his. . . . The vir- 
 tue of Alfred, like the virtue of Washington, con- 
 sisted in no marvellous displays of superhuman 
 genius, but in the simple, straightforward discharge 
 of the duty of the moment. But Washington, 
 soldier, statesman and patriot, like Alfred, has no 
 claim to Alfred's character of scholar and master 
 
 [190] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 of scholars." (Freeman's "Norman Conquest," 
 Vol. I. pp. 49-53). 
 
 For the remainder of this Lecture I will give you 
 some account of two great figures that stand out most 
 conspicuously in the English Church and State dur- 
 ing the Danish troubles that followed the reign of 
 King Alfred. These are the figures of Dunstan, 
 the first great Ecclesiastical Statesman in England, 
 and Cnut, England's great Danish King. Dunstan 
 was born near Glastonbury about 924. He was of 
 noble family, a nephew of Alfeah, bishop of Win- 
 chester, and probably related to the royal family, 
 with which he was most intimately associated. He 
 w^as a very precocious boy, and soon acquired all the 
 learning that he could get then in England. His 
 ardent devotion to study brought on brain fever, 
 which affected his nervous system and imaginative 
 temperament, and made him at times the victim of 
 fantastic visions. He early developed remarkable 
 artistic talents in music, painting, and metal work, 
 and such rare skill in mechanics as gave him the 
 reputation of a magician. In early youth, at the 
 court of Athelstan, grandson of Alfred, Dunstan 's 
 beauty and accomplishments made him a great fav- 
 orite in the ladies' bower, but excited the hostility 
 and persecution of his rude and ignorant rivals. 
 Their rough usage — they threw him once into the 
 horse-pond — brought on a severe attack of brain- 
 fever, which drove him from court, and changed the 
 current of his life. He built himself a hermit's cell, 
 whither he retired from the world, and gave him- 
 
 [191] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 self up to study and prayer — diverting himself some- 
 times by his fondness for working in metals. 
 
 Here, like St. Anthony and Martin Luther, he 
 fought the devils of temptation in realistic fashion. 
 
 St. Dunsban, as the story goes, 
 Caught the devil by the nose." 
 
 The story is that once in his disordered fancy, as 
 he toiled at his forge, he seized the foul fiend by 
 the nose with his red-hot tongs. But Dunstan was 
 not long allowed his ascetic solitude. If he would be a 
 monk, the new King Edmand would have him master 
 of his new trade, and made him Abbot of Glastonbury 
 at the age of twenty-two. Here he began his 
 career as a reformer of the monastic life, rebuilding 
 the old monastery on a large scale with his private 
 wealth, setting his own house in order, and making 
 it a model to other monasteries as a religious centre 
 and also a school of higher learning. At the same 
 time Dunstan began his other new career as a States- 
 man, becoming Treasurer of the Kingdom and 
 Adviser to the King. During the succeeding reign, 
 under the youthful and delicate Edred, the chief 
 power of the Kingdom fell into Dunstan 's hands. 
 But his bold and high-handed action at the Corona- 
 tion of the boy, Edwy, cost him his place at Court. 
 This youth was so infatuated with his kinswoman, 
 Elgivy, whom the Church forbade him to marry, 
 that he rudely left the banquet with his lords and 
 counsellors for Elgivy 's charming society, and Dun- 
 stan brought him back forcibly to his insulted 
 
 [192] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 guests. Shortly afterward Dunstan was outlawed, 
 and fled to Flanders. While at Ghent he spent his 
 time in studying the Benedictine Monastic system, 
 which he subsequently^ helped Archbishop Odo to 
 introduce into England. A revolt against Edwy's 
 rule gave his brother part of the Kingdom, and 
 then Edwy's death made Edgar sole sovereign of 
 all England. Dunstan was recalled, made bishop 
 of Worcester, then of London, and finally Arch- 
 bishop of Canterbury in 960, and virtually Prime 
 Minister to the King. From this time on Dunstan 
 played the double role of Church Eeformer and the 
 foremost Statesman in England. History has only 
 recently begun to do Dunstan justice. Out of the 
 mass of monkish legends on the one side, and ignor- 
 ant prejudice on the other, the real man has slowly 
 emerged, and is now seen to be very much of a man. 
 Instead of the blind and bigoted ecclesiastic which 
 he has been represented to be, he is revealed as a 
 far-seeing statesman, and an earnest but moderate 
 ecclesiastic — pursuing a definite, but pacific policy 
 in each capacity, and doing much to give to his King 
 the name of ''Edgar the Peaceful." It was clearly 
 Dunstan 's policy to push forward resolutely the 
 Church Revival of King Alfred and his successors, 
 to raise the standard of discipline, of moral and relig- 
 ious life among the clergy, both regulars and secu- 
 lars, — and at the same time to consolidate the West 
 Saxon Kingdom and supremacy into one strong 
 English nationality, which should absorb and assim- 
 ilate all the diverse elements, especially the resident 
 
 [193] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 Danish population which was fast becoming Eng- 
 lished, civilized and Christianized. **He employed 
 Danes," we are told, "in the royal service, and pro- 
 moted them to high posts in Church and State." 
 The wisdom of this statesmanlike policy was fully 
 justified by the results. 
 
 The English Monasteries had never had a common 
 effective organization under one central authority, 
 such as generally prevailed in Western Christendom. 
 Their isolation and independence had tended to 
 looseness of discipline and of life. The demoraliza- 
 tion of the Danish invasion had wrecked the whole 
 system, such as it was. Alfred had made a begin- 
 ning of restoration and reform, but it needed to be 
 pushed forward. This was undertaken by Odo, 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, with a strong hand and 
 a resolute will, but he encountered a desperate resis- 
 tance. There had been a long and bitter struggle 
 between the two classes of clergy — regulars and 
 seculars, or the monks and the parochial clergy — 
 which had nearly rent in twain the slowly reviving 
 English Church. Archbishop Odo was a Dane and a 
 Benedictine Monk. He had accompanied his King 
 Athelstan, too, in his military campaigns, culminat- 
 ing in the great victory of Brunaburgh. He had been 
 soldier enough to carry his stern military methods 
 into the Church, enforcing the Benedictine regula- 
 tions upon all the monasteries, and clerical celibacy 
 upon all clergy alike. Dunstan, his successor, was as 
 earnest an advocate as Odo of the reformed Bene- 
 dictine system. He believed, too, in priestly celibacy 
 
 [194] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 as the ideal for the clergy, but the Statesman did 
 not undertake to force it upon all indiscriminately 
 like the old soldier. He did not expect the married 
 clergy generally to drop their wives all at once, and 
 make a rush for the new ideal. Dunstan knew that 
 it would take time and tact to make celibacy the 
 rule, or even the ideal, in slow and easy-going Eng- 
 land. The bishops of Worcester and of Winchester 
 expelled the married Canons from their Cathedrals 
 and substituted Benedictine monks; but Dunstan 
 allowed them to retain their places at Canterbury 
 under stricter rule. His influence was undoubtely 
 given to the monastic clergy, but he showed a states- 
 manlike and Christian moderation in dealing with 
 the secular clergy, and in not trying to force his 
 own ideals too fast. By so doing Dunstan promoted 
 the peace and good of the Church, as he certainly 
 promoted the order and prosperity of the English 
 nation. 
 
 The latter part of his public career was stormy, 
 but after his retirement from political life he passed 
 his days peacefully at Canterbury in prayer and 
 praise, in preaching regularly in his Cathedral, and 
 writing pastoral letters to his bishops, in music and 
 the making of musical instruments, — his favorite 
 amusement, as of old, the working in metal, the 
 making of bells and organs. ^'But as he looked out 
 upon the world which he had left, he could not but 
 have felt that he had been permitted to set his 
 mark for good upon the English Church," and even 
 more upon the English nation. It has been noted 
 [195] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 that the year of his death 988, was the commence- 
 ment of the last and greatest invasion of the Danes 
 — the Danish Conquest of England. 
 
 **We are now called upon," says Mr. Cruttwell, 
 '*to witness one of those dramatic transformations 
 of character, which Shakespeare has pictured for us 
 in Prince Hal, and of which in all history is no more 
 striking instance than that of Cnut." 
 
 The coming of the Danish King Sweyne, and then 
 of his son Cnut, resulted, after a terrible struggle, 
 in giving a Danish King to all England in 1017. By 
 a strange and merciful Providence it gave England, 
 in Cnut, one of the best Kings it has ever had. 
 Beginning with slaughter and banishments, as soon 
 as his position was secure, this ruthless barbarian 
 was completely transformed. Cnut became erelong 
 a model King, wise, just, and devout, and greatly be- 
 loved. He pursued the same pacific policy with 
 his English subjects that Edgar and Dunstan had 
 pursued with the Danes, carrying it much further, 
 and succeeded in welding England into one Nation- 
 ality as had never been done before. Foreigner 
 as he was, he ruled like a native-born prince by 
 the old constitution of the realm, administering 
 ''Edgar's Law" wisely and justly, knowing no dif- 
 ference between conqueror and conquered. He put 
 the four great provinces into which the kingdom was 
 now divided under English instead of Danish Earls. 
 He used English troops for the Conquest of Norway, 
 and English priests for the conversion of Denmark, 
 and made some of them bishops of Danish Sees. Cnut 
 
 [196] 
 
THE COMING OF THE DANES 
 
 proved himself worthy of English trust by trusting 
 the English himself. Thus for eighteen years he 
 promoted peace and good will in State and Church. 
 His own marriage to the Norman Emma, the widow 
 of the English King Ethelred, seemed to bring about 
 the marriage of Dane and English. To the Church, 
 in particular, he showed the greatest reverence and 
 generosity. He made reparation for his father's and 
 his own cruelty and crimes by the most liberal gifts 
 and benefactions. He encouraged a high standard 
 for the clergy, and rewarded merit. At Bury St. 
 Edmund's he built and endowed a Benedictine 
 Abbey to the memory of the martyred English King 
 Edmund slain by the earlier Danes. He translated 
 to Canterbury with great honor the body of Arch- 
 bishop Elphege who had fallen nobly in defending 
 the city from Danish outrages. Cnut, as King of 
 Denmark, Norway, most of Sweden, and all Eng- 
 land, was the greatest potentate of his day in 
 Europe except the King of Germany, the Emperor 
 of the Holy Roman Empire. There is no reason to 
 question the sincerity of his love for England, and 
 for the religion of the English, which had now be- 
 come his own. There was hope for a Church, which, 
 lately ruined and desolated, could make such a con- 
 vert as Cnut, and which could erelong transform 
 his Danish followers into Christians and Churchmen 
 and law-abiding English subjects. It was the per- 
 sonal character and influence of Cnut which brought 
 order and peace out of chaos in England, for at his 
 death his dynasty went to pieces almost immediately 
 [197] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 under his degenerate sons. No wonder that ''Merrily 
 sang the Monks in Ely when Cnut King rowed by. ' ' 
 
 During a pilgrimage to Rome, the good King 
 wrote to his English subjects: — '*I have vowed to 
 God to lead a right life in all things, to rule justly 
 and piously my realms and subjects, and to admin- 
 ister just judgment to all. If heretofore I have done 
 aught beyond what was just, through headiness or 
 negligence of youth, I am ready with God's help to 
 amend it utterly." 
 
 [198] 
 
VII 
 
 The Coming of the Normans, and the Increase 
 OF Papal Power in the English Church 
 
 The Danes had done this much for England : they 
 had made it all one Kingdom, — and one Kingdom 
 it remained henceforth under all claimants to the 
 throne. Moreover the Danes in England had now 
 become merged into one people with the English. 
 But hardly had this been accomplished when the 
 invasion of another set of Northmen, called Nor- 
 mans, brought yet another kindred but wholly dif- 
 ferent people to rule the English and to be ulti- 
 mately blended with them into one race and State 
 and Church. 
 
 The loyalty and love which his English subjects 
 gave to good King Cnut were turned to loathing and 
 contempt for the Danish dynasty under his two de- 
 generate sons, Harold I and Harthacnut. When the 
 latter of these kings, a more worthless savage even 
 than his brother, ''died as he stood at his drink,** 
 it did not require much persuasion on the part of 
 Earl Godwin for the Witan in 1043 to restore the 
 old English royal line of Alfred and Ethelred in the 
 person of Ethelred 's son Edward. As the son also of 
 the fair and famous Norman Emma, Edward was the 
 step-son of Cnut, so that his election to the throne 
 was according to the fitness of things. But his 
 
 [199] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 reign, so far from strengthening the cause of the 
 English nation and Church, only served to prepare 
 the way for the new foreign domination in each. 
 Thirty out of the forty years of Edward's previous 
 life had been spent in congenial exile from his native 
 land at the Norman Court in France, where he had 
 virtually become a Norman himself in speech and 
 temperament and sympathies. On the English 
 throne he was far more of a foreigner than Cnut 
 the Dane had been. Fortunately, however, the 
 beginning of his reign was largely controlled by 
 Godwin, then the foremost and ablest statesman of 
 his country, the maker and manager of kings, and a 
 thorough-going Englishman. This great Earl of 
 Wessex, who had been almost the viceroy of Cnut, 
 held for a while the same position under Edward the 
 Confessor, with the additional advantage of being 
 his father-in-law. Godwin, though hard and grasp- 
 ing, was as wise and cautious as he was eloquent 
 and popular. The weakest point of this strong man 
 was his nepotism, his policy of promoting his own 
 family — good, bad, and indifferent — which made him 
 uphold such a reprobate as his outlawed son Swein. 
 And it was this weakness which lost him for a while 
 the popular favor when he came into collision with 
 the growing rival party at Edward's Court. The 
 national and patriotic party led by Godwin had 
 their hands full in keeping the King from yielding 
 up everything to his foreign favorites the Normans, 
 with whom he was fast filling the best places in State 
 and Church. The Norman Conquest of England was 
 
 [200] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 not as sudden as it seems. Edward's reign only 
 served to bridge over the interval between the 
 Danish Conquest and the more complete and lasting 
 Conquest by the Normans. He opened the way for 
 the latter. Edmund the Confessor, was not only 
 more Norman than English, but more monk than 
 King, or man. The Church occupied his thoughts 
 and plans more than the State, and his ecclesiastical 
 predilections were all in favor of the rapidly-grow- 
 ing Papal system of Hildebrand, of which the Nor- 
 mans were now the most strenuous champions. The 
 National Church of England had kept itself up to 
 this time comparatively independent of the increas- 
 ing encroachments of the new-fashioned papacy on 
 the continent. It was the only National Church left 
 in Europe which had not surrendered to the Roman 
 supremacy. Its time for this was to come later, and 
 Edward the Confessor was the advance guard of the 
 Papacy, as well as of the Normans in England. He 
 undertook to Normanize and to Romanize the Eng- 
 lish Church. And to Romanize meant now, as it had 
 not in the times of Augustine and of Theodore, to 
 Papalize. The English were the first people to attain 
 to nationality, and they were the last to surrender 
 the chief characteristic of their Church — its inde- 
 pendence and self-government. This was to lie dor- 
 mant for a while, and it was then to pass through 
 a tremendous struggle for life, but it would ultim- 
 ately prove **the survival of the fittest.'* Its power 
 of persistence would conquer all conquerors in the 
 long run. But the battle was begining, and Edward 
 [201] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 the Confessor probably did as much by his weakness 
 as William the Conqueror did by his strength to 
 undermine the strong sense of Nationality in Eng- 
 lish State and Church. Even the stem hand of 
 Earl Godwin, which was holding back the Danes 
 and other outside foes of England, was not strong 
 enough to save it from the Norman foe that had 
 found lodgment within in the person of the King. 
 It was especially into the Church, into its chief 
 bishopsprics and abbacies, that Edward had ad- 
 mitted his Norman favorites, and these were far 
 from being the best that Normandy could furnish. 
 A Norman monk named William, whom he made 
 bishop of London, seems to have been the only good 
 appointment of the lot. Ulf, whom he made bishop 
 of Dorchester, was so conspicuously incompetent 
 that the old Chronicle says, ''he did nothing bishop- 
 like, so that it shames us to tell more." The climax 
 of these appointments was reached when the See of 
 Canterbury became vacant. The monks of Canter- 
 bury duly elected one of their number, Aelfrie, a 
 kinsman of Earl Godwin, but the King passed him 
 over and bestowed the Primacy on Robert, the Nor- 
 man Abbot of Jumi^ge, whom he had previously 
 made bishop of London. Robert became the King's 
 prime favorite and adviser in ecclesiastical affairs, 
 and at the same time one of the most unpopular men 
 in England. Robert refused to consecrate Spear- 
 hafoc, who was appointed bishop of London by 
 King and Witan, declaring he had been forbidden 
 to do so by the Pope. ''We hear first," says Freeman, 
 [202] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 **of bishops going: to Rome for consecration or con- 
 firmation, and of the Roman court claiming at least 
 a veto in the nomination of the English King." Be- 
 sides the Norman bishops, the foreign influence was 
 further extended by the establishment of alien 
 Priories filled with foreign monks and constituted 
 as branches of Norman monasteries. Thus the pious 
 King surrounded himself with a party thoroughly 
 hostile to Godwin and the English patriotic party, 
 and no less opposed to the spirit and methods of the 
 National Church. A violent collision between the 
 two factions occurred at Dover in which some of the 
 Norman nobles in the train of Eustice, Count of 
 Boulogne and the King's brother-in-law, were 
 roughly handled. This occurred when Godwin was 
 out of favor not only at Court but with the people, 
 and he was outlawed and banished. During his 
 exile William, Duke of Normandy, and a powerful 
 rival of Godwin, paid a visit to Edward his royal 
 kinsman, and took occasion to spy out the land that 
 seemed so likely to fall into his hands. He found 
 Edward doing his own work so well that it seemed 
 hardly worth while to interfere, and the King is said 
 to have promised William then the succession to the 
 throne. The English only required a brief absence 
 on the part of Godwin, and the complete control of 
 affairs by the foreigners, to demand the recall of 
 the only man who could restore order in England. 
 Within a year he and his son Harold appeared in 
 the Thames with a fleet and an army which swelled 
 into a popular uprising by the time they reached 
 [203] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 London, and made a clean sweep of the Norman 
 party. Archbishop Robert and Bishop Ulf had to 
 cut their way out of London, sword in hand, and 
 make for the nearest port to Normandy. ** There," 
 says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, with evident de- 
 light and sarcasm, ''he lighted on a crazy ship and 
 betook himself at once over sea, and left his pall 
 and all Christianity here in the country, so as God 
 willed it, as he had before obtained the dignity as 
 God willed it not.'' 
 
 The Confessor calmly surrendered to Godwin's 
 dominance again, and devoted the remaining twelve 
 years of his reign to confessing his sins and other 
 congenial religious exercises. The cultus of St. 
 Peter became now his favorite devotion, and, to 
 celebrate the glories of the Prince of the Apostles, 
 Edward erected one of the noblest monuments ever 
 seen in England, the Abbey Church of Westminster. 
 Godwin died shortly after his restoration; but his 
 power with even more of his popularity, though less 
 of his prudence, passed to Earl Harold his son. 
 ** Harold," we are told, **was at this time thirty 
 years old, in the prime of his splendid manhood. His 
 tall and well-knit frame, his frank manners and 
 genial humor, combined with his military and states- 
 manlike capacity to make him the obvious leader of 
 the nation, and the typical embodiment of the Eng- 
 lish ideal. . . . Harold's qualities were such as 
 speedily to secure him a complete ascendancy in the 
 King's counsels" (Cruttwell). Edward loved Har- 
 old, but never even liked Godwin. Harold's eccle- 
 [204] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 siastical policy, however, was quite the reverse of 
 Edward's. When he did, reluctantly, appoint a 
 foreigner to office in the Church, he chose a German 
 Lorrainer as an offset to the Norman ecclesiastics, 
 and gave his countenance to the secular rather than 
 the regular clergy, especially in the great Abbey 
 and Collegiate establishment which he built at Wal- 
 tham. 
 
 Edward the Confessor died in 1066, a week after 
 the consecration of his great West Minster, and 
 there he was buried ; and there Harold, whom he had 
 designated on his death-bed as his successor, was 
 crowned for a reign of only nine months. But 
 within that same year another King w^as crowned 
 there also on Christmas-day 1066 — the Norman Con- 
 queror of Harold the last of the Saxon kings. 
 
 Shortly before this, Harold had defeated the 
 terrible invader, the Norwegian Goliath, Harold 
 Hardrada, and Tostig, the traitorous brother of the 
 English Harold, at Stamford Bridge ; but had fallen 
 on the fatal field of Senlac near Hastings in his 
 heroic struggle with the mighty Norman. Professor 
 Burrows 's ''Commentary" on this is a fine tribute 
 to Harold's last act of heroism. "We should be 
 inexcusable," he declares, "if we did not admit that 
 as a gallant soldier, fighting to the death for Eng- 
 land against the foreign invader, Harold will always 
 have a grand place in the list of national heroes. He 
 must have it. It is perhaps the finest thing in Eng- 
 lish history, — that noble stand, with a half -disci- 
 plined, half-armed force, against the organized host 
 [205] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 of France and Normandy, led by the greatest cap- 
 tain of the age. In all other respects, morally, 
 religiously, and politically, Harold was neither 
 better nor worse than his contemporaries." (''Com- 
 mentaries on the History of England.") Those of 
 you who enjoy a good historical romance, as an 
 occasional diversion from Hebrew, or Dogmatics, 
 and as perhaps an aid to livelier Homiletics, might 
 well afford to read (in vacation-time, of course) one 
 of Bulwer's best novels, "Harold — the Last of the 
 Saxon Kings;" and, as another of the same sort and 
 same period, Charles Kingsley's "Hereward the 
 Wake— Last of the English." 
 
 The death of Harold left England without any 
 national leader competent to cope with William the 
 Norman, who had come to claim the throne. There 
 was none of Harold's line fit to succeed him, — none 
 of the old royal line of Alfred but a boy Eadgar, 
 grandson of Edmund Ironsides. He indeed was 
 proclaimed King, but almost his first public act was 
 to head the representatives of the English nobles, 
 clergy and people, to offer the crown to the irresisti- 
 ble Norman on his arrival in London. ''They bowed 
 to him for need," is the pathetic chronicle. It 
 would take years yet for William to conquer all 
 England, but future resistance would be only local 
 and occasional, and was bound to be futile. William 
 claimed the English throne, not as Conqueror, but 
 as the legitimate heir to it; but until his forced 
 election by the Witan, he had no legal or moral 
 claim whatever. ' ' William was not descended, even 
 [206] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 in the female line, from any English King ; his whole 
 kindred with Edward was that Edward's mother 
 Emma was William's great aunt." (Freeman.) He 
 was a bastard besides. Edward, indeed, seems to 
 have promised the crown to William. Harold, too, 
 during an unwilling detention as a prisoner at the 
 Norman court, had probably taken an oath under 
 duress to support William's claim. But neither the 
 promise of the one nor the oath of the other gave 
 any valid right. The crown was not theirs to give 
 to any successor. It was not yet hereditary, and 
 William was not the heir. He never acquired any 
 sort of right until he was hastily elected by the 
 panic-stricken Witan, and duly crowned in Eng- 
 glish fashion. But, although the Norman Duke had 
 come to England with no backing there to his claim, 
 and only one Englishman had fought for him at 
 Hastings, he crossed the Channel with a very for- 
 midable backing on the other side — with the public 
 sentiment of all Europe to support him. He had 
 proclaimed Harold far and wide as a perjurer, a 
 traitor, and an enemy to Holy Church ; and Western 
 Christendom outside of England espoused the Nor- 
 man's cause. The Roman Church, above all, had 
 taken up the quarrel of William with England, with 
 the Pope to sanction the expedition as a religious 
 Crusade, and to bless the banner that floated trium- 
 phant over the field of Senlac. Pope Alexander II 
 even spared one hair of St. Peter for a ring on Wil- 
 liam 's finger. The Papacy had its own quarrel with 
 the English Church, which had held out so strongly 
 [207 1 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHUECH OF ENGLAND 
 
 against the claims of Eome to universal and su- 
 preme authority. William's expedition was for the 
 Conquest of the English Church to Rome, as well as 
 for the Conquest of the English throne for himself. 
 It has been well said, **The changes in the 
 religious life of England brought about by the 
 Norman Conquest were not less important than 
 those subsequently due to the Reformation. Dur- 
 ing the fifty years which followed the coming of 
 William, the Church of England became cosmopoli- 
 tan instead of insular, feudal instead of national, 
 papal instead of independent. For five hundred 
 years the connection between the Church of Eng- 
 land and the Church of Rome had been but slight. 
 Archbishops had received their palls from the pope. 
 Peter's pence had been paid with commendable 
 regularity. . . . But no serious attempt had been 
 made by the popes, since the days of Wilfrid, to im- 
 pose their own will unasked upon the English 
 Church, or to interfere with her own management 
 of her own business. Her bishops and archbishops 
 were appointed by the King and the Witan. Her 
 laws were either made by synods of bishops, and 
 accepted and forced by the King, or made by the 
 King and Witan and accepted by the bishops. They 
 were interpreted by courts held under the joint 
 presidency of the bishop and the alderman. The 
 ecclesiastical struggles which agitated the Contin- 
 ent hardly affected the English Church at all. She 
 was a passive, perhaps unconscious, spectator of the 
 terrible degradation of the papacy in the tenth 
 
 [208] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 century. She was unmoved by its extraordinary 
 revival under the influence of Hildebrand in tne 
 eleventh century." (Wakeman.) 
 
 It is hard to imagine a more striking contrast than 
 that between the English and the Normans at this 
 time. Although sprung originally from the same 
 Northern Teutonic stock, and destined erelong to 
 be fused into one people in England, their charac- 
 teristics were almost opposite. The Normans were 
 another variety of the same Northmen commonly 
 called Danes in England, who had already con- 
 quered England. While one set of them were in- 
 vading England in the ninth century, another 
 were doing the same thing in France. There they 
 had conquered the country on either side of the river 
 Seine, to which they gave the name of Normandy. 
 During the two centuries that followed, these had 
 become Frenchmen, just as their brothers across 
 the Channel had become Englishmen. It was their 
 peculiarity to become merged always into the people 
 among whom they settled, appropriating whatever 
 they found better in the conquered, and generally 
 improving on it. They were nowhere a home-mak- 
 ing or nation-making people, but cosmopolitans, 
 who absorbed from other nations, and gave a new 
 vigor and enterprise to such nations. They were 
 probably the most progressive people in Europe at 
 this time — delighting in whatever was splendid and 
 imposing and on a large scale. They had quickly 
 taken on the type of civilization and Christianity 
 most generally accepted in Europe, and which was 
 [209] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 reaching out for the control of the world. They 
 accepted with enthusiasm the dazzling scheme of 
 the Hildebrandian Papacy, and became the allies 
 of the popes for the subjection of the European 
 states to papal authority. 
 
 Already, under Robert Guiscard and other adven- 
 turous nobles, they had made themselves masters of 
 Sicily and Southern Italy. There they constituted 
 themselves a sort of standing army and body-guards 
 to the Papacy in its struggles with the Empire for 
 temporal and spiritual power. They became also 
 the leaders in the Crusades, and were the first to 
 recover the Holy City of Jerusalem from Moslem 
 misrule and restore it to Christendom. In Nor- 
 mandy, during the century which preceded their 
 coming to England, they had welcomed the revival 
 of learning and art and religion which had spread 
 Northward from Italy. Normandy had become fam- 
 ous for its great monastic schools, its splendid Nor- 
 man churches unrivalled anywhere, and glorious 
 monasteries which sprang up as if by magic all 
 all over their Duchy, displaying a richness of imag- 
 inative genius in architecture, then the foremost art, 
 which had no equal in the world. They had also 
 appropriated the Roman love of order and discipline 
 and organization, along with the Roman religion, as 
 thoroughly as if these had been their own creations. 
 Thus it is easy to see that the coming of the 
 Normans brought much that was good and great 
 and sorely needed to England, whatever might be 
 the attending and ultimate evils. They gave a new 
 [210] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 impulse and a higher impulse, unquestionably, to a 
 Church which had latterly become ignorant and 
 narrow and sluggish. As Mr. Patterson remarks, 
 ''That which Carlyle calls the ''pot-bellied equanim- 
 ity" of the Anglo-Saxons required discipline and 
 drill, and they got it, both in the secular and religi- 
 ous spheres, from Norman drill-sergeants." The 
 English Church needed waking up to a larger and 
 better life, and the Normans awoke it to a struggle 
 which called forth all its dormant capacities. What- 
 ever temporary hardships and losses might be in- 
 volved, the outcome, in the long run, would be a 
 greater and more glorious Church of England for 
 the Anglo-Norman race. As has been said, "the infus- 
 ion of the finer Norman blood into the English and 
 Danish composition, . . . after the day of adversity 
 was past, made the conquered people glory in their 
 checkered history." (Burrows.) 
 
 William the Conqueror would have been a great 
 man in any age or country. He was born at Falaise 
 in 1027, and succeeded his father Robert, Duke of 
 Normandy, when he was only seven years old. He 
 reigned for fifty-two years over his Norman duchy. 
 It is related that when he was a baby, this natural 
 son of Robert II and of the tanner's daughter 
 Arlotta, clutched a straw from the floor and held it 
 so fast in his little fist that it could not be taken 
 from him. The child was father to the man. Hav- 
 ing enlarged his dominions in France greatly, and 
 often proved his military skill and prowess, he was 
 now to show even greater ability as a ruler and 
 [211] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 statesman on a larger scale than ever before; for 
 he did not abandon his Norman duchy when he took 
 England. It was not until four or five years after 
 the battle of Senlac that William, having put down 
 all serious revolt, became master of all England. 
 Then he turned his attention to reorganizing the 
 whole political and ecclesiastical life of the Eng- 
 lish. In doing this his policy was as shrewd and 
 far-sighted as it was stern and relentless. Like 
 Cnut, he aimed to be a real English King, but, un- 
 like the Dane, he could not be loved by the English, 
 and did not deserve to be. Love was not his strong 
 point. He was always feared, however, and very 
 often respected. He reversed Cnut's policy of put- 
 ting an Englishman wherever he could by ** turning 
 the rascals out" of every place they held. Hard 
 and merciless as he was to his Anglo-Saxon sub- 
 jects, he did not attempt to overthrow their King- 
 dom and Church, their laws and institutions. His 
 idea was to leave these mostly intact, but by degrees 
 to gradually adapt them to the altered conditions — 
 to transform every thing by putting the bold, pro- 
 gressive Norman spirit into the whole machinery 
 of government. He gradually changed the entire 
 personel, substituting his Norman friends for his 
 English enemies everywhere. Thus a new set and a 
 new type of men, with new language, ideas, habits, 
 took the place of the old land-owners, earls and 
 thegns, bishops and abbots, until the English Na- 
 tion and Church were quite metamorphosed, and 
 ''hardly knew where they were at." I cannot do 
 
 [212] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 more here than to point out some of the leading 
 changes wrought by his ecclesiastical policy. 
 
 In his way William was a religious man — a devout 
 son of the Church, according to the standard of his 
 time and country ; and among the princes of his daj^ 
 exceptionally faithful to his wife, and free from 
 simony in his ecclesiastical appointments. But the 
 English Church, which had been intensely national 
 and ardent in its support of Harold, must be bent 
 to the will of the Conqueror. The English bishops, 
 in particular, had been among his strongest oppon- 
 ents, and William was **very stark towards those 
 who withstood him." At first the King only filled 
 the vacant Sees with Norman bishops; but, when 
 he determined to depose the remaining English 
 bishops, instead of playing the tyrant himself and 
 overriding English law, he shrewdly deferred to 
 the Pope, and allowed him the long-sought oppor- 
 tunity of taking a hand in English ecclesiastical 
 affairs. In order to clear the decks for action, the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury must be the first to go 
 overboard. This was Stigand, the friend and par- 
 tisan of Godwin and Harold. He had been pro- 
 moted to Canterbury, without giving up Winchester, 
 when Robert the Norman archbishop had to flee for 
 his life. This See had not been connically vacated. 
 Robert had been driven away and outlawed, but he 
 still claimed his office, and the Pope had sustained 
 the claim. Consequently the appointment of Stigand 
 had been irregular, to say the least. To make mat- 
 ters worse, Stigand, having no pall of his own, had 
 [213] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 assumed that left behind by Robert in his hasty flight. 
 Later he had received a pall from Benedict X, who 
 had not made good his own election and had been 
 turned out as a schismatic anti-pope. There were 
 not unfrequently in those days two popes, and some- 
 times three in the field. Even Harold himself had 
 not allowed Stigand to officiate at the consecration of 
 his new Waltham Abbey, or at the funeral of Ed- 
 ward the Confessor, or at Harold's own coronation. 
 William had been crowned by the Archbishop of York, 
 although he allowed Stigand to be present, and other- 
 wise treated him with consideration. And yet Stigand 
 had held the Primacy for nineteen years. Now Wil- 
 liam wanted the place for a better man, and one who 
 would carry out his ecclesiastical policy. So he al- 
 lowed the Pope the rare privilege of turning out the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury, and incidentally other 
 bishops at the same time. The King graciously in- 
 vited the Pope to send his Legates to England — 
 something which had not happened there for about 
 300 years. Accordingly at a great National Council 
 at Winchester in Easter Week, 1070, William was 
 first crowned over again by the Papal legates, and 
 then began the business of deposing the national 
 bishops. Stigand 's case was soon disposed of. He 
 was not only removed from his high office, but was 
 kept under restraint at Winchester for the rest of 
 his life. Then followed his brother Athelmar, the 
 East Anglian bishop, and Athelwin of Durham. Soon 
 after Athelric, Bishop of Selsey, was disposed of. (It 
 was a cold day for Athels.) When the English 
 
 [214] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 bishops were finished up, the abbots took their turn 
 in going out. Only one English bishop was left to 
 keep up the Anglo-Saxon line ; and his case is a most 
 interesting one. "Old Bishop Wulfstan," we are 
 told, ''was indebted to the holy simplicity of his life 
 for being allowed to hold his See of Worcester dur- 
 ing the reigns of William II. He had been appointed 
 much against his own will to the See of Worcester in 
 1062. Florence of Worcester tells us that Wulfstan 
 declared ' ' he would rather have his head cut off than 
 be a bishop." He was summoned before the Council 
 sitting in Westminster Abbey, and charged like other 
 bishops with ignorance of the French language. Be- 
 ing ordered, says Roger of Wendover, to give up his 
 bishop's staff, he was willing to obey the Council, but 
 he would only surrender it to Edward the Confessor 
 who had given it him. Advancing to the Confessor's 
 tomb there in the Abbey, and invoking in English 
 the King whom both Normans and English regarded 
 as a saint, he said, "Master, thou knowest how un- 
 willingly I took upon myself this charge. ... To 
 thee, therefore, I resign the charge which I never 
 sought." "He then laid his crozier on the tomb. 
 Then, turning to the living King, he said in the few 
 Norman words he could command, 'A better than 
 thou gave it me : take it if thou canst. ' No one dared 
 to take it. The story runs that no one could take it, 
 for that it adhered to the tomb till Wulfstan, at the 
 command of William himself, took it, and remained 
 bishop of Worcester, the Cathedral of which he built, 
 until his death at the age of sixty-eight." 
 
 [215] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 In connection with the rebuilding of the beautiful 
 Worcester Cathedral, another touching story of the 
 venerable bishop illustrates his saintly character. 
 When the Minster was sufficiently advanced to admit 
 of the monks entering it, and the order was given for 
 dismantling the roof of the old building erected by 
 St. Oswald, we are told that Wulfstan wept. He was 
 reproached by his monks for not rather rejoicing over 
 so great a work, but replied, ''I look at the matter 
 otherwise, for wretched are we who destroy the works 
 of the saints, that we may gather fame for ourselves. 
 That age of blessed men knew not indeed how to rear 
 pompous temples, but rather how under any sort of 
 roof-tree to sacrifice themselves to God, and to draw 
 their flock by their example; contrariwise we of the 
 present time vie with one another in heaping up stones 
 and neglecting souls." 
 
 The removal of the English bishops and the re- 
 placing them with Normans, was followed in not a 
 few cases by the removal fo their Sees from small 
 villages, or decayed towns, to larger and busier cen- 
 ters. That of Wells was removed to Bath, Selsey to 
 Chichester, Dorchester to Lincoln, Lichfield to Ches- 
 ter, and Sherborne to Old Sarum, afterwards to Salis- 
 bury. To the King's nephew Osmund, Bishop of Old 
 Sarum, we owe the revision of the English Liturgies 
 known as the "Use of Sarum," which became sub- 
 sequently the principal use of the English Church and 
 the basis of our Prayer Book. It must not be sup- 
 posed, however, that these Episcopal changes of the 
 King were intended simply to provide places for his 
 
 [216] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 own favorites. However unjust his policy towards 
 the incumbents and to the English people, William 
 seems to have been conscientious and judicious in his 
 appointment of Norman bishops. Green calls Wil- 
 liam's bishops *' pious, learned, energetic." "The 
 Conqueror's bishops," says Stubbs' 'Svere generally 
 good and able men, though not of the English type 
 of character. They were not merely Norman barons, 
 as was the case later on, but scholars and divines 
 chosen under Lanfranc's influence." Even so decided 
 a Low Churchman as Charles Hole declares, "These 
 higher Norman ecclesiastics did not come in, like the 
 Italian dignitaries of a later day, to plunder the 
 Church of England and carry off the spoils. Their 
 energies and the wealth they gathered w^ere expended 
 in their adopted land. They could not preach to the 
 people in their native tongue ; but they could in other 
 ways dignify religion and make it attractive to the 
 higher classes. They were planting the soil with great 
 palaces of religion, which have outlived most of the 
 proudest castles that defended them. These cathe- 
 drals have marked England, we may hope forever, 
 with the Divine Name of Christ, in lines of the most 
 impressive beauty that architecture can represent. 
 Men like these must have helped to soften the stern 
 despotism in which they had a part. Pledged as they 
 were to the people, the English as well as the Nor- 
 mans, they were unconsciously helping to unite the 
 two races, so building up a second and stronger Eng- 
 land than the nation which had fallen with Harold." 
 ("A Manual of English Church History.") 
 
 [217] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 This brings us to the remarkable man, who was 
 behind the King's ecclesiastical policy, whom he made 
 Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of all Eng- 
 land — the greatest archbishop between Theodore and 
 Anselm. Lanfranc was an Italian, born in Pavia 
 about 1005, where he studied law and became a teacher 
 of jurisprudence. When about thirty-five years old 
 he was attracted to Normandy by its demand for 
 scholars. For a few years he conducted a successful 
 school at Avranches. Then he suddenly resolved to 
 renounce the world and secular teaching and devote 
 himself to the religious life in some solitary retreat. 
 As he wandered through the forests of Ouche he fell 
 among thieves who stripped him of his small store of 
 valuables and left him bound to a tree with his hands 
 tied behind him. In this evil plight he tried to pray, 
 but found to his dismay that he had forgotten how. 
 His loud cries for help, however, whether to God or 
 man, or both, brought him succor from some passing 
 Good Samaritan, who loosed him and directed him to 
 the humble cell of a man of God in the neighborhood. 
 This was Herlwin of Bee, engaged in building an oven 
 when the unhappy traveler presented himself beg- 
 ging to be made a monk. 
 
 Here Lanfranc spent a long novitiate of hard dis- 
 cipline in a monastery which had much religion and 
 no learning. Herlwin himself, formerly famous as a 
 knightly soldier, had just learned to read at the age 
 of forty. He and his ignorant monks needed a teacher 
 as much as Lanfranc needed religious guidance and 
 discipline. The latter soon resumed his teaching, now 
 
 [218] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 as a Canonist and Theologian, and attracted so many 
 students from near and far that Bee became famous 
 throughout Europe. With Lanfranc as Prior it soon 
 had to be enlarged. Among his pupils were Auselm, 
 his successor at Canterbury, and another Anselm who 
 became Pope Alexander II. It was here that he en- 
 tered the field of controversy with the famous Beren- 
 gar of Tours and put forth a notable treatise in de- 
 fense of Transubstantiation, then gaining acceptance 
 as the scholastic doctrine of the Holy Eucharist. He 
 might have been better employed, especially as his 
 doctrine was not true ; and * ' it was not in theology, ' ' 
 it has been well said, ''that Lanfranc 's talents were 
 to shine brightest, but in the field of practical states- 
 manship. ' ' 
 
 It was while Lanfranc was Prior at Bee, that 
 William, Duke of Normandy, became first his bitter 
 enemy and later his fast friend. In defiance of Pope 
 and Council the masterful Duke had married his 
 cousin Matilda of Flanders within forbidden degrees 
 of relationship. Lanfranc expressed openly his strong 
 condemnation of the marriage, and the enraged Wil- 
 liam ordered him to leave the duchy and do it quickly. 
 So, amid the lamentations of his brethren and his 
 pupils, Lanfranc sorrowfully departed from his be- 
 loved Bee. The monastery could only boast of one 
 horse, and that went lame as the good prior rode 
 away. The story goes that Lanfranc met William on 
 the road to Rouen and bowed politely to him — the 
 lame horse bowing also, after his kind, in sympathy 
 with his master's forlorn situation and his own. Wil- 
 
 [219] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 liam demanded whither the rider was going, and the 
 bold prior answered cheerfully, "I am leaving your 
 duchy in obedience to your command, and would do 
 so more quickly, if you would give me a better mount. ' ' 
 William replied, ''You are the first criminal I have 
 met who asked a boon of his judge." That was the 
 beginning of their close friendship and partnership 
 in the government of England. 
 
 Lanfranc remained at Bee till William promoted 
 him to the new monastery which the Duke erected at 
 Caen in return for the dispensation regarding his mar- 
 riage with Matilda which Lanfranc got for him from 
 Rome. William's wonderful Abbey at Caen still 
 stands, bearing in its stern grandeur the impress of 
 his genius. William afterward offered Lanfranc the 
 bishopric of Rouen, which he declined. But the King 
 of England would take no refusal when his friend 
 tried to beg off from the Archbishopric of Canter- 
 bury on the plea that he did not speak the English 
 language. The English language was now at a dis- 
 count in England, and William himself was not a first 
 class performer with it. 
 
 Lanfranc has been described by a recent historian, 
 Cruttwell, as "next to Hildebrand the first Church- 
 man of his time. Less heroic in his conceptions and 
 less covetous of power than the Pope, he excelled him 
 in prudence and sagacity of judgment. His supreme 
 merit lies in his perfect grasp of the problem before 
 him. By appealing to William's genuine religious 
 feeling, by never thwarting his will, he continued to 
 steer the Church of England during these eventful 
 
 [ 220 ] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 years with complete success, neither sacrificing its just 
 rights nor coming into collision with the royal pre- 
 rogative. . . . Lanfranc's policy was that of Hilde- 
 brand tempered by prudence, softened by sympathy, 
 and above all, limited by William's despotic will. 
 For William, though genuinely loyal to what he con- 
 ceived to be the rights of the Pope, was entirely re- 
 solved to wield supreme authority within his realm, 
 and to share it neither with Pope nor Archbishop." 
 (''The Saxon Church and the Norman Conquest.") 
 
 And so it came to pass that the Duke of Normandy 
 and the Prior of Bee, who now thoroughly understood 
 one another, undertook together, in their new roles 
 as King and Archbishop, to reform the English Church 
 after the Norman fashion, and, to a certain extent, 
 after the Roman fashion. They, and their newly ap- 
 pointed bishops were men who acknowledged the au- 
 thority of the new kind of Papacy, and accepted some 
 of the new-fangled Romish doctrines. There were 
 several other conspicuous features of the Hilde- 
 brandian scheme which the King and the Archbishop 
 did their best to promote. One was the much needed 
 reform of the monasteries according to the stricter 
 discipline and the higher learning of the Clugny pat- 
 tern. Another was the celibacy of the clergy, for 
 which Lanfranc labored more zealously than wisely, 
 with only partial success. He had to content himself, 
 like Dunstan, with a compromise. The married clergy 
 were excluded from the Cathedral chapters. Mar- 
 riage for the future was forbidden even to the paro- 
 
 [221] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 chial clergy, but those already married were not com- 
 pelled to abandon their wives. 
 
 Another part of the Hildebrandian program which 
 it suited William to carry out, strange to say, was the 
 entire separation of the Ecclesiastical Courts. The 
 King probably hoped by this means to balance the 
 bishop's power against that of the barons. Hitherto 
 it had been the immemorial legal system of the Anglo- 
 Saxons that the civil and the ecclesiastical courts 
 should constitute one body presided over by the bishop 
 and the alderman (or sheriff) sitting side by side in 
 the court of the Shire. The Witanagemot, too, was 
 as much an ecclesiastical as a civil council of the na- 
 tion, composed of clergy as well as nobles. Bishops 
 and their clergy were as much subject to the one com- 
 mon law of the land as the humblest layman. They 
 did not constitute a separate caste, much less inde- 
 pendent rulers of the laity, as the Theocracy of Hilde- 
 brand proposed. With less sagacity and foresight 
 than usual, William withdrew the bishops and abbots 
 entirely from civil courts, and constituted them a 
 separate ecclesiastical court with jurisdiction over all 
 ecclesiastical persons and causes. This new arrange- 
 ment was destined to give endless trouble in England 
 under William's sons and successors for centuries to 
 come. Among other dangers it opened the way for 
 appeals to the Roman court from the decisions of the 
 English ecclesiastical courts. It also tended very soon 
 to put all grades of ecclesiastics, from archbishops to 
 grave-digger, even though guilty of the most atrocious 
 crimes, beyond the reach of the civil court. It went 
 
 [222] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 far towards bringing about the future struggles of the 
 Church with the Crown on the one hand and with the 
 Papacy on the other. 
 
 But, there was another side to this situation, which 
 must not be forgotten, viz. : "If these measures were 
 fitted in some ways to denationalize the English 
 Church and bring it into closer relation with the 
 central authority at Rome, any such tendency was 
 more than counterbalanced by the legislation, also sup- 
 ported by Lanfranc, which placed the Royal Su- 
 premacy on a footing which it had never before at- 
 tained. Thus it was enacted that bishops, like barons, 
 were to pay homage to the Crown, and the clergy were 
 to acknowledge no one as Pope until the Royal consent 
 had first been obtained; that no Letters from Rome 
 were to be published till approved by the King; that 
 no Council was to pass laws or Canons except such as 
 should be agreeable to the King's pleasure; that no 
 bishop was to implead or punish any of the King's 
 vassals without the King's precept; and that no ec- 
 clesiastic was to leave the country without leave 
 obtained. 
 
 William and Lanfranc were willing enough to go 
 a considerable way with the new Papal policy in 
 bringing about what they considered needed reforms ; 
 but they drew the line at — in fact they erected a solid 
 stone wall in front of — the Royal Supremacy over the 
 English Church. In this respect William the Norman 
 out-Englished the English, and out-Henryed Henry 
 VIII, by taking a Protestant position as pronounced 
 as Henry's. The one and only respect in which 
 
 [223] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 Henry VIII was ever Protestant was that he was 
 against the Pope. When the Pope claimed to be the 
 Supreme Head of the Church in England, William, 
 like Henry, proposed to occupy that position himself, 
 and so announced and so acted. When Hildebrand 
 became Pope in 1073, and, in return for the signal 
 service rendered to William the Conqueror by his pre- 
 decessor in the Papacy, Alexander II, demanded that 
 William should pay three years ' arrears of Peter-pence 
 and do homage to the new Pope for his crown, the an- 
 swer came promptly and emphatically, "One request 
 I have granted, the other I refuse. Homage to thee 
 I have not chosen, nor do I choose to do. I never 
 made a promise to that effect, neither do I find that 
 it was ever performed by my predecessors to thine." 
 The King grimly concluded his letter to this effect by 
 piously asking for the Pope's prayers. We are not 
 told whether he got them or not. That is another 
 story. But he went on calmly investing his new 
 bishops in England with ring and staff at the very 
 time when Pope Gregory VII was excommunicating 
 and deposing his own Emperor for doing the same 
 thing — when Henry IV stood shivering in the snow 
 for three days in bare feet and no overcoat over his 
 penitential garb at Canosa. Hildebrand had taken the 
 measure of the man on the English throne, and had 
 learned that "there is a time to keep silence." What- 
 ever homage the English Church might come to render 
 to the Papacy, the old idea of an independent National 
 Church under its own Primate and King was not 
 utterly wiped out by William and Lanfranc; and 
 
 [224] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 would be heard from again when the Normans had 
 become Englishmen and the English Church had 
 ceased to be Roman and become again Catholic and 
 Protestant against a recreant Rome. Lanfranc sec- 
 onded the King in his stand against the Papacy ven- 
 turing too far in England. Although he went to 
 Rome to get his pall, he declined to repeat his visit, 
 even when he received from Hildebrand an imperious 
 letter to the following effect: "Hitherto you have 
 out of pride or negligence abused our patience. . . . 
 By virtue of our Apostolic authority we enjoin you 
 that, setting aside all pretences and insignificant ap- 
 prehensions of danger, you make j^our appearance at 
 Rome within four months," closing the letter with 
 the threat of his being thrown out of St. Peter's pro- 
 tection, and deposed from his office. Although Lan- 
 franc lived eight years after the receipt of this letter, 
 his only answer was to stay at home and attend to his 
 duties as Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of 
 all England. 
 
 "The main Results of the Norman Conquest" are 
 thus summed up by Mr. Freeman, the highest English 
 authority on this subject: "We can hardly be wrong 
 in calling it the most important event in English 
 history since the first coming of the English and their 
 conversion to Christianity. It was a great and violent 
 change which, either in its immediate or in its most 
 distant results, touched everything in the land. Yet 
 there was no break, no gap, parting the times before 
 it from the times after it. The changes which it 
 wrought were to a great extent only the strengthening 
 
 [225] 
 
THE MAKING OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 
 
 of tendencies which were already at work. The direct 
 changes which we may look upon as forming the con- 
 quest were done gradually and under cover of legal 
 form. No old institutions were uprooted, though some 
 of them were undermined by new institutions set up 
 alongside of them. The revolution which seemed to 
 be the overthrow of freedom led in the end to its new- 
 birth. Under an unbroken succession of native kings, 
 freedom might have died out, as it did in some other 
 lands. As it was, the main effect of the Conquest was 
 to call out the ancient English spirit in a more definite 
 and antagonistic shape, to give the English nation 
 new leaders who were gradually changed into coun- 
 trymen, and, by the union of the men of both races, 
 to win back the substance of the old institutions under 
 new forms." 
 
 This seems to be the proper place for closing our 
 study of ''The Making of the Church of England." 
 After the coming of the Normans there was hardly 
 any new kind of material added to the marvelous 
 mixture of ingredients, racial and other, that con- 
 tributed to the constitution of the English Church. 
 All the constituents are now in, that went to the Mak- 
 ing of this Church. The Reformation, of course, is 
 a very important subject, but does not belong here. 
 That was the Re-formation, or Re-making. The Mak- 
 ing of this Church, we have seen, was only part of 
 a larger work, because the Church of the English was 
 itself a factor and a principal one in the Making of 
 the English Nation, the English Race, the English 
 Language and Literature, and, above all, the making 
 
 [226] 
 
THE COMING OF THE NORMANS 
 
 of English Character. All of us who, in any measure, 
 share in these great blessings owe something at least 
 to the grand old English Church, and might well hail 
 her in the slightly altered words of Tennyson's Wel- 
 come to the Danish Princess of Wales, now the Dow- 
 ager Queen Alexandra of England. 
 
 ''Saxon or Dane or Norman we, 
 Teuton or Kelt, or whatever we be. 
 We are all one in our welcome of thee!" 
 
 [227] 
 
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