BOOK I.

Early Bri

tish Christianity.

We do not, of course, mean to say that all persons who assumed the Christian name in those times were eminently pious, or even pious at all; nor do we say that all believers in the early church were endowed with the spirit of martyrdom. We speak of what was common, not of what was invariable. The spirit of self-sacrifice evinced by Christians in their lives, and often in their deaths-sometimes by the sword, sometimes by fire, sometimes by the lions, and not unfrequently in the dungeon and the mines-was a potent influence in attracting others to the cross. It will be seen, then, that the faith of believers in the early ages of the church was a faith rooted in conviction, and nurtured by intelligence; and that it created deep spiritual feeling, such as made men zealous for the propagation of their creed, little concerned about the symbols of religion when compared with the reality; and brave, even to martyrdom, when the hour of trial came upon them. It is something to know that the earlier disciples of Christ were men and women of this type. The evidence which made them all this must have been great. which trained them to all this must have been teaching which had produced deep personal conviction. power which sustained them through all this must have been Divine. For it must be remembered that the promise of the Gospel was not the promise of a sensuous or a communistic paradise. To the believer in that day, the present was dark-a region subject to the powers of darkness. The brightness on his path came from a distance-from above.

The teaching

The

To the spontaneous impulse of minds brought under such influences we must attribute the introduction of Christianity into Britain. The notion that St. Paul

preached to our rude ancestors is a fond imagination,
and nothing more. The legend concerning King Lucius
and the Popes Evaristus and Eleutherius, is a manifest
invention from a later time.* During some three cen-
turies, the Roman army in Britain was rarely less than
50,000 men. The civil government must have been
proportionably great, and the settlers in the island under
the Roman protection must have been greatly more
numerous. These strangers came from nearly every
part of the empire, and many of them beyond a doubt
brought Christianity along with them. In the early part
of the fourth century, the council of Arles, assembled
by the Emperor Constantine, consisted of thirty-three
bishops, summoned from Africa and from parts of the
Western Empire, and three of that number were from
Britain. In the following century, when the Britons
withdrew to the fastnesses of Wales, they did so, not as
pagans, but as Christians.
At the close of the sixth
century, Augustine and his monks found them in
pos-
session of a Christian hierarchy, a Christian literature,
and a Christian civilization sufficiently strong to eradi-
cate any remains of their old faith or usage that might
have been left among them. All these acquisitions they
must have made while under the Romans. There was
no channel through which they could have received them
afterwards.

CHAP. I.

gious life

The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons is commonly Early reliattributed to the missionaries sent by Pope Gregory. It among the is a fact, however, and a fact not sufficiently remem- Saxons. bered by Englishmen, that the conversion of our Saxon

• Archeologia. xxxiii. 208 et seq.

+ Horsley's Britannia Romana. Book i. c. 6. Book ii. c. 1. Labbe, Concil. Ed. Harduin. i. 259-270.

Anglo

BOOK I. ancestors to Christianity is not so much due to Roman missionaries as to missionaries from another quarter. We learn from authentic history, that St. Columba, and a humble brotherhood consisting of twelve disciples, settled in Iona, on the coast of Argyleshire, in 654. The history of this fraternity is the history of men honestly separated to the pursuit and communication of religious knowledge. They dwelt in structures formed of rough hewn wood, and covered with reeds. Every thing pertaining to their condition was in keeping with such appearances. Nevertheless, they sent off pious men to settle in different parts of Scotland and Ireland, and every such settlement was a centre from which missionaries went abroad to strengthen the faith of Christians, and to attempt the conversion of the heathen still left in the land. They possessed many books, laboured hard to multiply them by transcription, and great was the value they set on them. What learning the age possessed was in their keeping, and the authority which they assigned to the Scriptures, and the devout spirit in which they studied them, were most exemplary. The northern half of Anglo-Saxon Britain was brought to the profession of Christianity by the direct or indirect influence of the disciples of St. Columba. Through Bernicia and Deira, the successful labours of the Scottish missionaries were extended to East Anglia, to Mercia, and even to Wessex. Anglo-Saxon Britain would have become Christian through their means had the service been left wholly in their hands.*

Purpose of

this chapter.

But it must suffice to say, that so far Britain had

*Bede's Eccles. Hist. Book iii. c. 1-4. Cumin, Vita Columb. Adaman. Vita Columb. Pinkerton's Vita Antique Sanctorum. Chron. Sax. A.D. 565. Malms. De Reg. Book iii. c. 3.

become Christian, first under the Romans, and then CHAP. I. under the Saxons, by means of that free and spontaneous action which we see to have been so characteristic of Christianity in its earlier and purer times. This glance at religious life in those days must not be thought irrelevant to our present purpose, inasmuch as the whole subsequent history of Christianity consists of two great phases, bearing an intimate relation to what Christianity then was. The first of these consists in a gradual departure from that more scriptural standard of faith and feeling, as seen in the subsequent history of Romanism; and the second consists in an effort to return to that standard, as seen more or less in the history of Protestantism, and eminently in the history of English Nonconformity. To use the words of one of the greatest of men, Truth ' indeed came once into the world with her Divine Master, ' and was in perfect shape most glorious to look on: but 'when he ascended, and his apostles after him were laid 'asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, 'who—as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with 'his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris'took the Virgin, Truth, hewed her lovely form into a 'thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. 'From that time, ever since, the sad friends of Truth, 'such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that 'Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and 'down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find 'them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and 'Commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master's second 'coming: he shall bring together every joint and member, ' and shall mould them into one immortal feature of love

'liness and perfection."

.

米

• Milton's Works, Mitford's edition, vol. ii. Areopagitica, 435.