the first King of England; but we may practically reserve that title for Alfred the Great.

Between this date and the Norman invasion, A. D. 1066, which was the epoch of Hildebrand, lies the later English period, during which England itself began to be created, in its constitutions and laws, by the action of the Church. The bishops established the State, "as bees make the honeycomb"; but the State never established the Church of England. She was the precedent condition of the State itself. In the preceding age, Ina, king of Wessex, speaks of the nascent Parliament as having concurred, in its three estates, in enacting the laws. He enumerates: "My bishops, and all my eldermen, and the eldest witan of my people, with a great gathering of God's servants." Such was the "Witenagemot," or assembly of the Wise.

23. ALFRED, THE HEAD OF OUR RACE.

Alfred revised and collected the laws of his predecessors, rejecting, with the advice and consent of his witan, what he could not approve, but modestly inserting nothing of his own, because "he could not foresee what might be good for such as should come after him." The incursions of the Northmen kept this great prince busy, all his days, resisting their ravages. They made a "dark age" for England; but, at all his intervals of respite, he was not less active in his literary pursuits, promoting learning, encouraging piety and study among the clergy, and with his own hands translating Holy Scriptures and good books for his people. He lived

through the ninth century, and expired in the first year of the tenth. I have quoted a saying of King Edgar's about this horrible century. In his reign, Dunstan became Archbishop, and brought in many Italian monks, by whom the sorest evils were soon inflicted on the Church. The ascendency of the Danes and the reign of Canute deserve careful study; they promoted somewhat, at a dangerous period, the influence of Rome, where the Paparchy was now growing to enormous proportions, amid not less enormous corruptions. Edward the Confessor is revered as a Saxon saint and a true Englishman; but Earl Godwin ruled the land, and his son Harold succeeded. All things had prepared the way for a new era; and, after a brief reign of forty weeks, the battle of Hastings gave the realm to William the Norman.

24. TAKING OUR BEARINGS.

Let us see where the Anglican Church stood on the eve of its enslavement to an alien aggression. The idea of a "Papacy" was familiarized; but it was the indefinite conception of a great Canonical Patriarchate, in the apostolic city of Rome, to which filial deference was due. It was a Papacy, but not a Paparchy. Elsewhere the Decretals had done their work more effectually, but England was Nicene, and not Roman. It was free in spirit, and, as yet, in form.

Observe that the canon of Holy Scripture, the Creeds, the Episcopate, were identical with those

1 See Lecture V., page 151.

we have now. There was no doctrine of Transubstantiation; the communicant received in both kinds; there was no forced confessional. The clergy were mostly married men. The whole scholastic system of theology was non-existent. There were gross superstitions, but no false dogmas. Avoid reading into these times any ideas distinctively more modern, and bear always in mind that the Catholic Church still meant what it means in the Nicene Constitutions. It took five centuries more to produce such a monstrous conception as that of "the Roman Catholic Church," -a local church that is claiming to be identical with the whole Church Universal.

25. THE ANGLO-NORMAN PERIOD.

The new period is that of the Anglo-Normans, but it includes the century of transition, which was not complete when the Angevine dynasty came in. We shall only note the great changes it created in the Anglican Church, and the debasement of its Nicene position.

It introduced an entirely new class of ideas, for with French and Italian priests came a Latinizing process which, by and by, subjected the Anglican Church to the Roman pontiff; never so, however, as to rob it of its identity as the Church of England, or to absorb it into the Italian, or Ultramontane, system of passive subjection. The terribly sincere Hildebrand was now carrying the assumptions of the Decretals to their logical consequences, and in him the fraudulent decrees of

Nicholas reached their highest mark. Gregory endeavoured to establish a universal Paparchy. This level of culmination was maintained by the ferocious Innocent III.1 (A. D. 1198), and subsequently till we reach the fourteenth century under Boniface VIII., the last of those despotic pontiffs who successfully enforced the Decretals. The reaction. was then begun. But it was precisely when the Hildebrandine epoch was successfully transforming the Latin churches into a system of ecclesiastical satrapies, that England was Normanized. Hildebrand sanctioned the invasion of William. purpose and policy are evident. This remnant of the Nicene Constitutions must be absorbed. He who forced Henry, the Emperor, to kneel at his gate amid the snows of Canossa, and whose new position was marked by an edict claiming the title of "Pope" as no longer to be applied to other patriarchs or bishops, now proposed to subject England to the Paparchy.

His

26. THE NEW EPISCOPUS AB EXTRA.

I have not called William "the Conqueror," for our forefathers were not conquered when Harold was overcome. It was a duel between two claimants of the English throne, neither of whom had a well-defined right. But William was the nominee of Edward the Confessor, and came in as his regular successor, swearing to maintain the laws and institutions of the English, which, with all his rude and cruel ideas, he did in many respects quite effectu1 See Note U".

ally. I do not wholly share the feeling of those who see in him only the brutal "Bastard” and despot. Happily, he was bred in the Gallican school of ecclesiasticism, and had imbibed some ideas from Charlemagne, as we shall soon see. What St. Louis did for France in a later age, William allowed the Church of England to do, promptly and vigorously, at this crisis. In fact, when Henry VIII. was called upon by the estates of his realm to "reassume" the ancient rights and privileges of his crown, he did little more than revive the laws of the Church and the land, as they were maintained at this time, even under the pontificate of Hildebrand. This will soon appear from the facts I shall note.

27. THE FOREIGN ARCHBISHOPS.

During the four Anglo-Norman reigns, there were five Archbishops of Canterbury. The first two were Italians; the other three were Frenchmen. By education and in habits of life the Italian primates were, of course, more or less Normanized; for Lanfranc and Anselm were taken from the monastery of Bec. To make way for the former, Stigand, in heart a non-juror, after four years, was deposed. William would not be crowned by him, but gave that honour to another. He belonged to the Anglo-Saxons, and did not fancy the invasion; but he was not, apparently, what an English primate should have been at such a moment. It is important, and very creditable to William, to note that, besides Stigand, only two or three of the Anglo-Saxon bishops were deprived.