The Evolution of an Empire | Page 5

as it has
proved, more permanent kingdom; and the History of a United England
had begun.
While Christianity had been effaced by the Teuton invasion in England,
it had survived among the Irish-Britons. Ireland was never paganized.
With fiery zeal, her people not alone maintained the religion of the
Cross at home, but even drove back the heathen flood by sending
missionaries among the Picts in the Highlands, and into other outlying
territory about the North Sea.
Pope Gregory the Great saw this Keltic branch of Christendom,
actually outrunning Latin Christianity in activity, and he was spurred to
an act which was to be fraught with tremendous consequences.

CHAPTER II

.
[Sidenote: Augustine Came, 597.]
The same spot in Kent (the isle of Thanet), which had witnessed the
landing of Hengist and Horsa in 449, saw in 597 a band of men, calling
themselves "Strangers from Rome," arriving under the leadership of
Augustine.
They moved in solemn procession toward Canterbury, bearing before
them a silver cross, with a picture of Christ, chanting in concert, as they
went, the litany of their Church. Christianity had entered by the same,
door through which paganism had come 150 years before.
The religion of Wodin and Thor had ceased to satisfy the expanding
soul of the Anglo-Saxon; and the new faith rapidly spread; its charm
consisting in the light it seemed to throw upon the darkness
encompassing man's past and future.
An aged chief said to Edwin, king of Northumbria, (after whom
"Edwins- borough" was named,) "Oh, King, as a bird flies through this
hall on a winter night, coming out of the darkness, and vanishing into
the darkness again, even so is our life! If these strangers can tell us
aught of what is beyond, let us hear them."
King Edwin was among the first to espouse the new religion, and in
less than one hundred years the entire land was Christianized.
With the adoption of Christianity a new life began to course in the
veins of the people.
[Sidenote: Caedmon Father of English Poetry.]
Caedmon, an unlettered Northumbrian peasant, was inspired by an
Angel who came to him in his sleep and told him to "Sing." "He was
not disobedient unto the heavenly vision." He wrote epics upon all the
sacred themes, from the creation of the World to the Ascension of
Christ and the final judgment of man, and English literature was born.
"Paradise Lost," one thousand years later, was but the echo of this
poet-peasant, who was the Milton of the 7th Century.
In the 8th Century, Baeda (the venerable Beda), another Northumbrian,
who was monk, scholar, and writer, wrote the first History of his
people and his country, and discoursed upon astronomy, physics,
meteorology, medicine, and philosophy. These were but the early
lispings of Science; but they held the germs of the "British Association"
and of the "Royal Society;" for as English poetry has its roots in

Caedmon, so is English intellectual life rooted in Baeda.
The culmination of this new era was in Alfred, who came to the throne
of his grandfather, Egbert, in 871.
He brought the highest ideals of the duties of a King, a broad,
statesmanlike grasp of conditions, an unsullied heart, and a clear,
strong intelligence, with unusual inclination toward an intellectual life.
Few Kings have better deserved the title of "great." With him began the
first conception of National law. He prepared a code for the
administration of justice in his Kingdom, which was prefaced by the
Ten Commandments, and ended with the Golden Rule; while in his
leisure hours he gave coherence and form to the literature of the time.
Taking the writings of Caedmon, Baeda, Pope Gregory, and Boethius;
translating, editing, commentating, and adding his own to the views of
others upon a wide range of subjects.
He was indeed the father not alone of a legal system in England, but of
her culture and literature besides. The people of Wantage, his native
town, did well, in 1849, to celebrate the one-thousandth anniversary of
the birth of the great King Alfred.
But a condition of decadence was in progress in England, which
Alfred's wise reign was powerless to arrest, and which his greatness
may even have tended to hasten. The distance between the king and the
people had widened from a mere step to a gulf. When the Saxon kings
began to be clothed with a mysterious dignity as "the Lord's anointed,"
the people were correspondingly degraded; and the degradation of this
class, in which the true strength of England consisted, bore unhappy
but natural fruits.
A slave or "unfree" class had come with the Teutons from their native
land. This small element had for centuries now been swelled by
captives taken in war, and by accessions through misery, poverty, and
debt,