The Evolution of an Empire | Page 5

activity, and he was spurred to an act which was to be fraught with tremendous consequences.

CHAPTER II
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[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, which drove men to sell themselves and families and wear the collar of servitude. The slave was not under the lash; but he was a mere chattel, having no more part than cattle (from whom this title is derived) in the real life of the state.
In addition to this, political and social changes had been long modifying the structure of society in a way tending to degrade the general condition. As the lesser Kingdoms were merged into one large one, the wider dominion of the king removed him further from the people; every succeeding reign raising him higher, depressing them lower, until the old English freedom was lost.
The "folk-moot" and