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like Bregwin the German, loth to quit his studies, and protesting an honest nolo episcopari against his elevation; Latin verse-makers, like Tatwine, before whom a false quantity would hardly have reckoned as a venial sin, who wrote classical enigmas in rather enigmatical Latin, and, in other respects, "passed his life in the quiet routine of episcopal duty." There were men who seemed to have mistaken their vocation: Odo, the Dane, who was three times on the field of battle after his consecration, and saved King Athelstane's life from the Northmen in the great fight of Brunanburgh, whose combative spirit, Dr Hook thinks, would in these days have found its natural vent in the House of Lords, in some trenchant onslaught upon the opponents of orthodoxy (possibly the Liberation Society, or the Essays and Reviews); and statesmen like Dunstan, who would have found in any vocation the road to power. We are seldom able to trace with much certainty the motives which led to their election in each particular case, but probably these were as various as the men. Their appointment rested, as we have said, entirely with the king; their confirmation by the clergy of the chapter seems to have followed as a matter of course. The pallium conferred by the Pope was as yet rather a token of honour than an investiture of office; and though the Roman See assumed the right of arbitration in appeals, its pretensions were set at nought whenever they were inconvenient.

It was a happy thought to comprise a History of the English Church in a series of biographies of its primates. Dr Hook very fairly observes, that it is quite as natural an arrangement as that to which we are all so well accustomed in secular histories of our own and other countries-the making the king the central figure, grouping the contemporary facts round him, and dividing the history into those arbitrary but convenient periods which begin and close with each suc

ceeding reign. It is true that the Archbishop of Canterbury could never be said to represent the Church as the king did the realm of England; but he serves as a centre-point none the less, and helps to localise in the reader's memory facts which, in themselves, are not so readily remembered as the more stirring events in the life of camps and courts. The one point in which the succession of archbishops fails to answer this purpose as conveniently as that of the kings has been found to do, is this, that as the latter usually succeed either by hereditary descent or by conquest, most of the needful particulars of the early life of each before his accession will have been naturally comprised in the reign of his predecessor; whilst an archbishop, succeeding to the primacy at a much later period of life than the king to the throne, and having a previous personal history to be told, quite distinct, in many cases, from that of his predecessor, obliges both author and reader continually to retrace their steps in point of time, in a manner which to the latter is sometimes rather bewildering, and which is the only inconvenient feature in Dr Hook's present arrangement.

The Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, then, is nothing more or less than a History of the AngloSaxon Church from the mission of Augustine into Kent. The annals of the early British, or rather Celtic, Church, are merely glanced at in an Introduction. The form which the author has chosen for his work necessarily precluded any fuller notice; for there were no British archbishops of Canterbury. And the difficulties which beset the ecclesiastical historian, in any attempt to sift truth out of the pious fabulists who have enlarged upon the first planting of Christianity in Britain, are certainly so formidable, that even Dean Hook's courageous spirit may be excused for declining to grapple with them. The Welsh writersalways strong in genealogies, temporal or spiritual-make out amongst

them that a majority of the apostles were in one way or another concerned in the evangelisation of their island. One almost wonders that they do not insist upon some at least of that body having been Welshmen by birth or descent. But probably Dean Hook's natural sympathies have had something to do, even though unconsciously, with this limitation of his ground. If there is one thing upon which he honestly prides himself, it is that he is an Anglo-Saxon. He evidently thinks much more of it than of being Dean of Chichester. "That indomitable spirit of independence which, inherited from our Saxon ancestors, is the glory and the characteristic of the English race." Such are the concluding words of this volume, and their spirit may be traced throughout. We confess that our Celtic feelings are slightly ruffled by the constant reiteration, by modern writers, of these Anglo-Saxon pretensions. The old national self-glorification (always pretty strong in the little island) used to content itself with the term Britons, which has grown quite oldfashioned and obsolete. It is the Anglo-Saxons who are to go everywhere, and do everything, in these days. There is no particular objection to a man calling himself an Anglo-Saxon, if he is so disposed; but the precise ground of this form of family pride is rather difficult to understand. At the best, AngloSaxon blood is but a successful cross. The modern Englishman who insists upon the title is quite as likely to be a combination of Celt and Dane. The Dean of Chichester's surname, no doubt, is of anything but Celtic derivation; but if we had his family tree drawn out from Woden downwards, we have little doubt but that his excellent moral and intellectual qualities would be found to be the result of a continued "natural selection" from the various national stocks which have peopled the island in succession, from Albion the seagiant and Brut the Trojan down to the latest Flemish immigration. How can any man tell, in these days,

what proportion of Saxon blood he has in his veins? No people seem to have cared less about pedigree. When the present David Jones traces his descent in a long series of aps up to King Arthur, although the historic truth is not conclusive, the principle is intelligible; or when a man tells us that his ancestor came over with the Conqueror, and points to his name on the roll of Battle Abbey, there is a certain amount of probability in the claim, whatever it may be worth, and there is room for a charitable hope that the Norman rider, when the fighting was over, brought his wife across seas, and lived a decent and respectable life afterwards; but a true-born AngloSaxon is a genealogical absurdity. It is very well for a poet like Mr. Kingsley, when he sings his song of the North-East Wind-we hope, by the way, that he has had the "Viking's blood within" him stirred sufficiently during this last spring it is very well for him to tell us that his forefathers came

"Conquering from the eastward, Lords by land and sea.' We have not the Kingsley genealogy before us, but it is quite as forefathers were the conquered inlikely that a proportion of all our the language of his parodist, stead of the conquerors, or came, in

"Blasting, blighting, burning,
Out of Normandie."

So far as the "great Anglo-Saxon race," as it is now the fashion to call it, has gone forth to rule or civilise the world, east or west, the Celt has gone with it, and has not been the last in the adventure, whether it were peace or war.

But although Dr Hook precludes himself, by the very title of his book, from dealing with the early history of Christianity in the British Islands, he does justice to the claims of the Celtic Church, in contradistinction to the Italian mission of Pope Gregory, to be the fathers of the Gospel. He admits in his Introduction what is undeniably true, that these claims "have been under

stated by the historian.” There were excuses for this: the Welsh traditions, and in a less degree the Irish, are palpably untrustworthy; and whatever more authentic records may have existed have probably perished, as Gildas of Bangor says they did, in the troublous days of foreign invasion. The author of the Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, though he takes Augustine's mission as his starting-point, is careful to give due honour to the teachers who had preceded him. It has been too often assumed that to Gregory, and his missionary Augustine, England was entirely indebted for the introduction of Christianity -that before that time its light had never reached beyond the remote fastnesses of Wales and Scotland. During the long rule of the Roman Church in England, this assumption was naturally encouraged for the greater honour of the Papal See. Popular belief, never very curious as to ecclesiastical antiquities, was quite content to adopt it; and popular belief maintains its ground long after historical investigation has disproved it. But it is curious to find even so learned and accurate a writer as Dr Stanley contributing unconsciously to strengthen the common misapprehension. Throughout the whole of his picturesque and interesting account of the "Landing of Augustine," there is nothing more than a passing allusion to the "remnants of the old British churches." He speaks of the Italian mission as "the means, under God, by which our fathers received the light of the Gospel," and points to Canterbury emphatically as "the first English Christian city." Even granting that such an expression as the first might be correctly used in a lecture delivered to the people of Kent, it is very misleading when published to be read by the general public of England. Of course Dr Stanley himself understood perfectly well what he meant to imply, and those who have any very moderate acquaintance with Church history will not misunderstand his words; but an ignorant

reader would scarcely imagine, from such a mode of statement, that there had been for centuries British metropolitans of London, and probably of York; that the last of the archbishops of London, Theonus, had been obliged to take refuge in Wales only eleven years before Augustine's arrival; and that, to use Dr Hook's own admission, "the northern half of Anglo-Saxon Britain was indebted for its conversion to Christianity, not to Augustine and the Italian mission, but to the Celtic missionaries who passed through Bernicia and Deira into East Anglia, Mercia, and even Wessex."

Historians have reproached the Celtic Church with a lack of zeal to attempt the conversion of the conquering Saxons. The remark is originally Bede's, who was himself, it must be remembered, a pupil of the Italian missionaries. Reserve and jealousy towards all foreigners is undoubtedly a characteristic of the Celtic nation, as it was of the Jews. But there is no need to seek in this national prejudice excuses for the apathy charged against them. A century of hard fighting for existence leaves little leisure or temper for evangelisation. A people who have been driven back, step by step, before a pagan invasion, disputing every river and every ridge as they retired, and who have been worsted in a war of extermination, may be excused if they bury their religion for a while with their defeat in their mountain fastnesses, and leave the successful invader to the protection of his own gods. It is no reproach to the disinherited British Church, if the Gospel, which the Saxons trode out before them as they advanced, came back into Kent from a different quarter.

The mission of St Augustine, then, was, even in Kent, but the rekindling of the old altar-fires. Nay, the light was found still burning there. Though the King of Kent was a heathen, his Queen, Bertha, had brought with her from her father's court at Paris her Christian chaplain, Luidhard. An ancient church

had been assigned her for the offices of her faith, the free exercise of which had been specially reserved to her in the marriage-contract; and it is probable that Augustine found others who had already be come disciples of the Cross even in the Saxon Cæsar's household.

It was within these walls, then, already consecrated to the simple worship of the early Britons, which had now been succeeded-probably after no long interval-by the Gallican liturgy, from which it differed little except in language, that for the first time the splendours of the Roman ritual found place in England. For this Italian mission was perfectly disciplined and appointed for its purpose, that of converting, through their chiefs, a tribe of successful warriors, easily impressible through their outward senses, and ready to give assent to the imposing and authoritative in questions of religion. Even then, Rome had the art in which other Christian churches have so often been lamentably wanting, of choosing her instruments and her mode of operation wisely for their ends. Augustine went forth to his work of conversion with other apostolic furniture besides scrip and staff. He had many high qualifications for his office; but he was an evangelist of a different type from Ninian or Columba. Neither he nor any of his forty monks would have liked to cross the channel with the Irish saint in his ox-hide boat. Pope Gregory had provided them well with all the appliances which the Roman Church could furnishsilver crosses, vivid paintings of the Sacred Passion which might attract the barbarian's eye, and appeal to his rude sensibilities, harmonised litanies which might charm his ears, and interpreters who might explain the solemn message. More than all, they brought with them what Rome could then give-sound doctrines, not indeed wholly free from superstitions, but in which superstition had not yet overlaid the truth. One thing Gregory failed to give them,

the honest enthusiasm and faith in their high purpose which he felt himself. They had all but turned back in their passage through France, terrified at the length and difficulties of the journey. Augustine himself returned to Rome, and asked to be released from an engagement of which he had not counted the cost; and nothing but the firmness of the Pope himself, and the influence of his personal encouragement, prevented this Anglo-Saxon mission from being a failure in the very outset.

They made a brave show, however, when at last they landed at Ebbe's Fleet, between Ramsgate and Pegwell Bay, and marshalled their procession to meet King Ethelbert. Augustine himself was one of nature's princes, like Saul"from his shoulders upward,” says the chronicler, "higher than any of the people." Before him went a verger carrying a massive silver cross, and another who bore what served for the banner of the mission

a large painting of the Saviour on a board, "beautiful and gilded;" whilst the choir of brethren, led by Honorius, Gregory's own pupil, chanted a litany to those sweet

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Gregorian tones" which, after so many ages, are still found to have such a wondrous charm alike for the rudest ear as for the most scientific. Some of the words have been traditionally preserved by Bede :— "We beseech Thee, O Lord, for Thy mercies' sake, that Thy wrath and Thine anger may be turned away from this city, and from Thy holy house,-for we have sinned. Allelujah.”

The immediate results of the mission are too well known to be told again here. In that little British church of St Martin the king of the Anglo-Saxons received baptism from Augustine. The font used at the ceremony is still shown to Canterbury pilgrims; but unimaginative archeologists point to the mouldings, and refuse to countenance the illusion. It is a pious fiction, they say, like the impress

of Augustine's footstep which was long shown on the rock where he landed, or the mark still pointed out on the ruined wall of St Pancras another Celtic church reconsecrated by the Roman missionary -the last hold of the "devil's claw" in his attempts to retain possession; for the building, under the Saxons, had been converted into a pagan temple. The new faith soon spread, when it became known that the Bretwalda and his witan had formally adopted it; and on the Christmas after Augustine's landing, ten thousand Saxons were baptised at once in the river Swale. The chroniclers assure us that nothing like undue influence was used; but when we read that the "Dooms of Ethelbert "-laws at this time enacted by the Bretwalda in full council-declared Christianity to be the adopted religion of the nation, we are left at liberty to attach what value we please to these wholesale conversions; and we are not surprised to find that, in the next succeeding reign, a change of ruler produced a large reaction to wards paganism.

Ethelbert himself, however, was a sincere convert, according to his light. He presented his new archbishop (who had gone for consecration to the Archbishop of Arles) with his own palace at Canterbury for a residence, and withdrew himself to Reculver, the old Roman fortress of Rutupium. He granted to him, also, a piece of ground outside the city walls, where was built the great monastery of St Peter and St Paul, afterwards known as St Augustine's, and now once more the site of a missionary college, and still bearing his name. Outside the walls, because one great object was to provide a consecrated spot for the burial of faithful kings and bishops, and the customs of Christian Rome, as of Pagan Rome, forbid burial within the gates of the city. There Ethelbert and Augustine both had their bones laid; and the value attached to such relics of the faithful, and the sanctity which

they were held to confer upon their resting-place, led in after years, as we shall presently see, to very indecorous contests at the burial of future archbishops.

The Italian prelate, who now found himself firmly established at Canterbury, whether from personal ambition or from zeal for his motherchurch, desired to assert the supremacy of Rome in matters ecclesiastical, to an extent which Gregory himself appears never to have claimed or desired. He wished to unite the newly-formed Saxon Church with the ancient British one; but his notions of union implied that the Celtic bishops should acknowledge him as their metropolitan. They, on the other hand saw in him only an equal. The pallium which the Pope had lately sent to his new archbishop conveyed with it no mysterious rights in their eyes. There was a difference, too, in their practice as to the correct time of keeping Easter: one of those differences in formal points which seem so unimportant, but about which, we know from all experience modern and ancient, men will do battle to the death, and for which they will sacrifice, with all the complacency of martyrs, the weightier matters of justice and charity. We' are not going to discuss the controversy either as to metropolitan rights or the calculation of Easterday. But there is one story recorded by Bede and others which reads like truth, which supplies a key to the real causes which turn such discussions into bitter feuds, and which, even if it be a fable, is worth preserving for the lesson which it bears, that a gentle word might decide a controversy which confident assertion and learned arguments only push to extremities. There appears to have been no archiepiscopal dignity claimed at this time by any of the seven British bishops who were assembled to discuss their line of action previous to a second conference with Augustine on the questions in dispute. They were not unwilling, for the sake of the

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