unity of the Church in the island, to acknowledge the new Archbishop of Canterbury as their metropolitan. Even on the Easter question, they might have been prepared to give way then as they did afterwards. But in their first interview with Augustine, they had remarked something in his tone which made them hesitate to submit themselves to his rule as an ecclesiastical superior. Their impression of his character is corroborated, as Dr Hook observes, by the fact that his friend Pope Gregory took occasion twice in his pastoral letters to warn him against being puffed up with vainglory. The British prelates took counsel with a certain anchorite, highly reputed for saintliness and wisdom.

"The anchorite advised them to accept Augustine as their metropolitan, if he were a man of God. 'But how are we to know that he is a man of God?' 'The Lord,' continued the anchorite, "hath said: "Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly of heart." If Augustine be meek and lowly of heart, he bears the yoke of Christ, and the yoke of Christ is all that he will seek to lay on you. But if, instead of being meek, he is a proud haughty man, it is clear that he is not of God, and his proposals may be rejected by us.' On further consultation, it was determined to put him to the test. It was to be so arranged as to permit Augustine and his little party to arrive first at the place of meeting; then the seven British bishops, with Dinost and their men of learning, were in an imposing procession to draw near. 'If Augus tine,' said the anchorite, 'shall rise up to meet you as you draw near to him, then accede to his proposals, and accept him for your leader; but if he shall treat you with contempt, and not rise to meet you, let him be by us contemned.'

"They came. Augustine was seated, and the British prelates were permitted to enter the place of conference, not as if they were equals, but as if they were inferiors, summoned into the presence of one who had a right to lay down the law. They were justly indignant. They would concede nothing. They positively refused to receive Augustine as their metropolitan. They assigned their reason: If, while they were equals, he would not treat them with respect, what were they to expect if they elected him their

superior, and took the vow of canonical obedience?"

Lingard dismisses the whole story with a sneer, remarking that such advice was an easy mode of avoiding responsibility by "leaving to accident the decision of the controversy." Be that as it may, it was

a

course adopted nine hundred years afterwards-whether with a recollection of Augustine or not

by St Philip Neri, perhaps as wise a man as Dr Lingard. A certain nun had laid claim to a miraculous gift of inspiration. Her abbess sent to inform the Pope of the treasure she possessed in her establishment. The holy Father requested Philip to examine the case. It is Mr Emerson who tells the story :—.

"He threw himself on his mule, all travel-soiled as he was, and hastened through the mud and mire to the distant

convent. He told the abbess the wishes of his Holiness, and begged her to summon the nun without delay. The nun was sent for; and as soon as she came into the apartment Philip stretched out his leg all bespattered with mud, and desired her to draw off his boots. The young nun, who had become the object of much attention and respect, drew back with anger, and refused the office. Philip ran out of doors, mounted his mule, and returned instantly to the Pope. 'Give yourself no uneasiness, holy Father; here is no miracle, for here is no humility."

Augustine showed that they were not far wrong in their judgment of his character. He threatened them, in his excitement, with the vengeance of heaven for their obstinacy; and when, a few years after the archbishop's death, the memorable slaughter of the monks of Bangor Iscoed by the Saxon army took place, the Saxon chroniclers pointed to it triumphantly as the fulfilment of prophecy. The feeling which Bede shows on the subject is quite sufficient to mark him as a bitter enemy of the Celtic Church.

New missionaries had arrived from Rome to strengthen Augustine's hands; and they brought with them from Pope Gregory the scheme of a complete church estab

lishment for England. There were to be two archbishops, with twentyfour suffragans; and so little elasticity has shown itself in the system, that it remained unaltered as to numbers for above twelve hundred years, and, with one single addition, has remained so ever since. It was long, however, before the scheme was worked out into practice. Augustine himself lived to see only the sees of Rochester and London established, and filled by bishops of his own nomination.

Four of the companions of his mission succeeded him in the see of Canterbury. When the last of these, Honorius, was laid with his predecessors in St Augustine's, he left his own branch of the Church Catholic in England decaying, so far at least as outward progress was a sign, and the rival Celtic episcopate increasing in numbers and activity, and carrying on the work of evangelisation on its own account with great zeal and success in the northern, eastern, and even the midland districts of England. The new archbishopric of York, to which the Italian Paulinus had been consecrated upon his conversion of the King of Northumbria, had only a precarious and almost nominal existence for a few years. The splendid pall which was sent from Rome in 634 was never worn by Paulinus as metropolitan of York, though he thought it a harmless ornament when he retired to the see of Rochester; the Pope's letters, if they reached him at all, found him a fugitive from his diocese; King Edwin had fallen in Hatfield Chase, and Penda the pagan, a name of terror to all Christians, was ravaging the kingdom. If Paulinus had baptised his tens of thousands like Augustine, the facile converts went back to their old faith with the change of circumstances; and when Christianity revived again in Northumberland, it was under a king who

sought his bishop from the Celtic Church instead of from Canterbury, and who fixed his restored see, not at York, but at Lindisfarne. A bishop of Celtic consecration also occupied the see of London. For nearly two years-for Honorius had recommended no successor the see of Canterbury was in abeyance. A Saxon was at last consecratedFrithona, better known as Deusdedit, the Latin appellation which he assumed to meet the taste of the Italian Church. By his good offices at the great Synod of Whitby, something like a union was effected between the two rival churches. The great Easter question was decided in favour of Rome by King Oswi, who seems to have acted as umpire on the occasion; and the decision was submitted to, according to the chroniclers, by all the Celtic church except a small minority, who still held with Bishop Colman of Lindisfarne, who resigned his bishopric rather than sanction the new usage. The recusants in Scotland maintained their ground for another generation, when they too gave way; but in Cornwall they continued the old British usage, probably up to the time when their kinsmen in Wales at last adopted the reckoning of the strangers. With characteristic obstinacy, these last held out until A.D. 770; and the commotion which the change excited amongst them may be estimated from the fact, that it forms one of the items of record, few and far between, in the earlier pages of the Chronicle of the Princes.*

Deusdedit died of the yellow pestilence, which carried off kings, abbots, and bishops, and desolated half England in 664; and a fatality might have seemed to hang over the Church when his successor, going to Rome for consecration, died there, with most of his company, of the plague. Its fortunes rose again under Theodorus of Tarsus-the "Philosopher,"

eessors.

as he was called-a Greek Churchman, who had conformed to the Latin usages, and who was probably the greatest scholar of his age. He was sixty-four years old when he was consecrated; but he lived to administer his see for more than twenty years, and he did more for the English Church than perhaps any one of his predecessors or suc"He converted what had been a missionary station into an established church." He undertook a personal tour of his large diocese; he laid the foundation of the parochial system, which is still the blessing of England-"the cheapest and best police," as even politicians have called it; he increased the numbers of the episcopate; his book of canons contains the elementary principles of our ecclesiastical order; and English scholarship owes its rise to the school which he at once established in Augustine's monastery at Canterbury, under the presidency of Benedict Biscop, and afterwards of Hadrian-an African churchman, who had declined the archbishopric in favour of Theodore, and whom William of Malmsbury describes as “a fountain of letters and river of arts."

The system of education pursued at the College of St Peter and St Paul was not so different from that now in use at our public schools as might be supposed. Of course the want of books at this time implied that the instruction should consist almost entirely of catechetical lecturing. It is singular that, after the lapse of twelve hundred years, a return to the form of teaching which was then a necessity should have appeared to some, who ought to be competent judges, a panacea for the shortcomings of modern universities. But a great proportion of the subject-matter of the teaching was the same as now. It will shock some readers, no doubt, and comfort others, to find that Latin verse-making was a prominent feature in the school at Canterbury, and that no less than a hundred

different kinds of metre were mastered by diligent scholars like Adhelm, afterwards Abbot of Malmsbury and Bishop of Shelburne. No wonder that when, after trying cloister life for a while as a monk, he went back to his cherished studies under Hadrian, he worked himself into a fever which nearly cost him his life. Our modern public schoolboys may congratulate themselves that some of the hundred measures have become obsolete, and that it is possible, of late, to reach a bishopric without such a terrible amount of learning. There is reason to hope, also, that other good old-fashioned helps to knowledge had not yet fallen into disrepute; at least Dr Hook informs us that, in the monastery on the Coelian Mount at Rome, there was preserved, in "affectionate remembrance" of Pope Gregory, amongst other precious relics, "the rod with which he would correct the inattentive;" and no doubt there were equally interesting reminiscences at Canterbury. Other more popular branches of education, however, were not neglected. Mental arithmetic is by no means a modern art: it was practised diligently in Theodorus's schools, as was also a somewhat complicated digital system of calculation; for the convenient Arabic numerals, it must be remembered, had not yet reached English schools, any more than printing and paper. There were brave attempts made, also, to teach what we now call special subjects, and useful knowledge: music, astronomy, natural philosophy, and medicine, had each their turn. The music was good of its kind; of the natural philosophy and astronomy, it can only be said that they kept pace with the theories of the day; and medicine is still so much an experimental art amongst ourselves, that it seems quite possible that our own theory and practice may appear as barbarous, in the light of future discoveries, as that of the seventh century now does to us. If Archbishop Theodore declared it to

be very "indiscreet and unskilful" to bleed a young lady on the fourth day of the moon, he was so far a step in advance of most surgeons of the passing generation, who took lancet ruthlessly in hand on every day throughout the year; while modern science carries out the archbishop's idea more consistent ly, and pronounces it indiscreet and unskilful to bleed at all, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred.

The collegians of Canterbury must have had their amusements as well as their studies; and probably of the same active kind as those which have been the delight of English youth in all generations. We may give a fair guess at them from a letter of Alcuin with regard to the education of the young monks at Wearmouth. He issues a monition—as more than one Vice-Chancellor has done to the undergraduates of a modern university-"not to pursue the winding mazes of hares,' or a profanity from which young Oxford and Cambridge would shrink-"to dig up the burrows of foxes."

Archbishop Theodore is also known as the first who arranged into a regular system-at all events in the Western Church-the principle of vicarious penance for sins committed after baptism. The "Penitential," which he now drew up, is the foundation upon which has been built that elaborate structure of religious ethics which has a voluminous literature of its own, and which has been at once the strength and the disgrace of Rome. There is this to be remembered, in justice to the original framers of the system by which it has been thought possible to compound for sin by a payment to Heaven, that the whole tenor of ancient law admitted this principle of satisfaction. Even human life had its fixed price; and the Saxon code laid down the value of each individual member of the state with great precision. Murder was by no means a ruinous indulgence for a rich man in those days, provided always that he confined him

self to victims of a cheap quality. He had only to be prepared to pay the wehr-gild, according to the legal tariff, and the state was satisfied that justice had been done. Churls could be killed at the rate of ten pounds a-piece; Welshmen, and we fear Scots, could be done cheaper. But archbishops came expensive : thirty-six times that amount, as for a prince of the blood-royal, was held a fair equivalent. An archbishop of Canterbury, indeed, if Hume's authorities are to be trusted, had a price set upon his head higher than a king of Kent. So, also, in matters of testimony, a thane's oath was to be taken as equal to that of six churls; and it took hard swearing on the part of six thanes to contradict a king. Where such a judicial system prevailed without shocking any sense of natural justice, and money could not only screen the powerful offender from punishment, but clear him from guilt in the eyes of society, the application. of the same principle to spiritual matters was easy and natural enough. It was right that there should be some restitution made to Heaven for wrong done; it must be made by prayer, by fasting, and by almsdeeds. Whatever truth there was in this theory of penance — and there was surely some-it was lost in the abuses to which such a system naturally led. The commutation of personal punishment for a money payment, already admitted in secular law, found its place naturally in penitential discipline; so that, in the Canons of Edgar, we have actually a rule given, by which a rich man may condense a fast of seven years, enjoined upon him as a penance by the church, into three days, by the simple rules of arithmetic-for as seven years is to one man, so will three days be to the necessary number of men whom the penitent is to provide, and pay to fast with him and for him. It is premised that this rule will only suit when "the sinner is a powerful man, and well provided with friends.' Such monstrous corruptions as

these did not pass unrebuked by the Saxon Church itself: fifty years afterwards, at the synod of Cloveshoo, the system of vicarious penance was distinctly reprobated; but it was in full work again under Dunstan, and has never been fairly purged from the Roman Church. Ten successive archbishops had now been buried in the Abbey Church of St Peter and St Paul; seven (the last was Theodore) lay in the porch; afterwards, there being no more room, the bodies were deposited within the church itself, the prejudice against intramural burial appearing to have gradually worn out. The value attached to such sacred remains has been already noticed. The monastery, in consequence, claimed a far higher degree of sanctity than the cathedral. But now the see was occupied by an architectural bishop. Cuthbert, who had already been busy in ornamenting the cathedral of his see of Hereford, proceeded to do the same at Canterbury. He grew attached to his own work; and the clergy who lived there with him -his "family," as it is pleasant to find them called in those days-took a very natural pride in it also. Perhaps the jealousy with which they regarded their brethren of the abbey, and the superior holiness which these assumed for their church as the sepulchre of the saints, was equally natural. Archbishop Cuthbert determined that whatever virtue there might be in his bones, his own cathedral church should have the benefit of it. But he was obliged to proceed with the utmost caution, for the monks were not the men to forego their established privileges without a struggle. Dr Hook tells the story well :

"Cuthbert felt at last that the stroke of death was upon him, and the clerks of the cathedral were summoned to the bedside of their archbishop. They came prepared, as usual when he could not attend the public worship, to chant the psalms of the day, and to read the comfortable words of Scripture. He then confided to the whole body the plan of

proceeding which he had before devised to give the cathedral a triumph over the insolent Augustinians. The grateful strictly to his injunctions. canons, clerks, and servants, adhered A mysterious silence was kept as to the archbishop's state of health. It was known that he was ill, but whether the illness was to be unto death no one was prepared to say. At length the cathedral bell was heard to give out its solemn sound. ing bell, and many a devout knee was It was supposed to be the passbent in private, and many a prayer uttered for the soul of the spiritual father who was now passing to his

account. When at last the knell sounded, the monks of St Augustine, the city to bear the body of the archwith solemn step and slow, paced through bishop to the monastery, until, arriving at the archbishop's palace, they were received by the cathedral party with shouts of ridicule and triumph. The archbishop had been carefully laid in the grave prepared for him in the cathehis death. His chapter had borne him dral, three days before the bell announced to his last home at midnight. were watching at his grave when the cathedral bell at last gave sound. It startled their consciences; they almost felt at first as if they had been guilty of a crime; but the feeling was momentthey heard their triumph proclaimed.” ary, and in the deep tone of the bell

They

Subsequent events proved that the cathedral party had not overrated the spirit of their rivals. When the next archbishop's death was expected, the monks and their retainers waited under arms, their abbot at their head, determined to seize the body and bury it within their own walls. But again the clergy of the chapter outwitted them by a similar stratagem. The monks were furious; and their abbot, Jaenbert, threatened an appeal to the Pope, and vengeance temporal and spiritual. The chapter seem to have had more wit than courage; they stopped Jaenbert's mouth by electing him archbishop, and they allowed him to be buried at St Augustine's. He took the precaution of being carried into the monastery before his death. But he was the last of the line who rests there.

Dr Hook observes with truth, that, although the sanctity of the