Angles and Saxons, took their pay by settling in the delightful lands they had defended. In the Isle of Wight and the opposite coasts settled the Jutes. Essex, Wessex, and Sussex tell the story of the Saxon immigration, and the Angles took the rest of the eastern coast into custody northward and far above the Humber. Such are our AngloSaxon forefathers, and I am not very proud of their conduct. But if they proved treacherous allies of the native Christians, they were pagans, who knew no better; and, feeble as were the Christians, they turned upon them at times and gave them a terrible threshing. Gildas, their own British chronicler, reproaches them as believers for not preaching to the Saxons, whom we may now for the first time call "the English," the Gospel of peace and love. The Saxons continued heathen. till converted by the missionaries of Gregory.

6. CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH.

His interest had been excited by the appearance of fair-haired boys from England in the Roman slave-market. "If only they were Christians," said the holy man, "not Angles, but Angels, they might be called." When he became bishop, as if remembering where Pelagius came from, he sent to convert them Augustine, a namesake of the great Bishop of Hippo. Now, though Gregory dealt with his missionaries and their converts in Britain very much as we deal with ours in China and Japan, his conduct, even as related by Bede at a later period, with the disadvantage of his less

primitive conceptions, is altogether in keeping with Gregory's primitive assertion of his adhesion to Nicene canons. He was not "the Universal Bishop"; he dictated no deference to his see, but advised Augustine to adopt improvements, if he saw any, among the churches of Gaul; and we cannot doubt that, had he known of their continued existence, he would have advised a generous and brotherly course in dealing with the ancient Christians of the land. These had retreated westward, and were now hemmed in among the mountains of Wales, and by the Southern seas in what we know as Cornwall, perhaps "the Horn of Wales."

7. THE EARLY ENGLISH.

Thus the Early English 1 period opens with the seventh century, say A. D. 601. Augustine repaired to France to be consecrated by the Bishop of Arles (Virgilius), who was assisted, according to the Nicene canons, by two other bishops, of whom the name of one only has come down to us; that of Ætherius, Bishop of Lyons. He succeeded from St. John, through Polycarp, Pothinus, and Irenæus, as the thirty-second bishop of that most primitive and illustrious see. Thus Augustine became the first Bishop of Canterbury, deriving his apostolic office from the churches of Ephesus and Smyrna, both mentioned in the Apocalypse, and saluted by an epistle from our ascended Lord himself with exceptional tokens of approbation.

1 Not to be understood of architecture.

8. CONSEQUENCES.

Great gratitude is due to Gregory for his nursing care and faithfulness in planting the Church of England; but we must not think it strange that the relations thus established between England and the great Apostolic See of the West led to consequences not in themselves happy, nor even canonical. Our own missionary bishops naturally write to their brethren here for instructions, and the English missionaries write personally to the Archbishop of Canterbury from the ends of the earth. It was much more necessary for similar relations to be kept up, in those days, with the great metropolis of Western Christendom, because books were few and all sources of information rare.1 Let us imagine how the new primate of England would naturally regard the great patriarch of Rome.

9. RELATIONS TO THE APOSTOLIC SEE.

Not as in any sense "Universal Bishop"; that Gregory abhorred. Not as having any powers or authority superior to his own as a bishop; that also Gregory had expressly and vehemently disclaimed.2 Yet the Church had established certain great patriarchs, among whom Gregory had a primacy of honour, but no "supremacy" of any kind. Beyond his own limited patriarchate, he might exert a watchful care to see that the Nicene and other œcumenical canons were obeyed; he could enforce them, however, only by the action of councils, 1 See Lecture III. § 16, page 95. 2 See Note T".

each subject to its own president, or metropolitan, and not to him. In a mission created by himself, he seems to have, naturally, expected a degree of deference growing out of such circumstances. All this Augustine would justifiably recognize. We must not be surprised to find that the great patriarch was invested in his eyes with an exceptional importance, as succeeding to the apostles St. Paul and St. Peter in the ancient world-centre. All the patriarchs were called Papa by way of eminence, and each in his own jurisdiction was "the Papa"; just as we call the nearest post-office "the postoffice," or the chief magistrate of our own city "the Mayor." This by no means implies that there are no other post-offices or mayors; and so, when Augustine speaks of " the Apostolic See," he detracts nothing from Antioch or Ephesus; and when he speaks of " the Pope," he by no means implies that the other patriarchs are any less "popes" than Gregory. Bear in mind that, as I have shown, what we understand by that term was not then imagined; and not till the close of the eleventh century did even a Roman pontiff presume to decree that this title should be peculiar to himself. For, not bearing all this continually in mind, the most erroneous impressions are derived from books that use such expressions unguardedly in the sense current in the times of their authors, as now among the vulgar.

IO. A DISCOVERY.

When Robinson Crusoe discovered a human foot-print in the sand, his sensations were serious.

When Augustine first learned that there were already Christians in Britain does not appear; but his first impressions of them were doubtless not very favourable. He learned that they were an unlettered race, who still kept Easter by the ancient, but now uncanonical, uses of Smyrna and Ephesus. For these had been overruled at Nicæa, by universal consent. Were the Britons deliberate schismatics? He doubtless imagined they were, but this was a mistake. The Britons had been so long cut off from commerce with other churches, that they had never received from Alexandria the annual computation. Gregory himself did not know of their existence, and it seems to me probable, as I have said before, that they kept on in the way received by Irenæus from Polycarp, and which Eborius and his companions had learned from Lyons and Arles to regard as lawful.1 Especially would they be likely to adhere to their old customs, so long as the Patriarch of Alexandria failed to communicate with them, as the canons prescribed. This was their misfortune, not their fault.

II. THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CASE.

Augustine would look at it very differently: they were ignorant barbarians, at best, and it was now time for them to obey the canons. Besides, though he had been expressly counselled by Gregory not to expect every national church to conform to the Italian usages, he felt sure, no doubt, that they were the best usages; just as some of us are quite sure 1 See supra, § 4.