CHAP.
II.

$10. The Penitential System.

higher in others. The monk could not help being an example of self-denial to others, and self-denial was the special virtue which the men of that fierce age needed most to learn. The monk could not help overflowing in bounty to the poor and suffering, and turning the fountain of blessing which he had opened in his own heart into a stream by the sides of which multitudes might rejoice. He represented not the best ideal of life, but the best ideal of the kind of life most opposed to the faults of contemporary existence.

The penitential system of the Church was an attempt to implant amongst laymen something of the monastic rule. The authors of the penitential code no more thought of descending into the heart and conscience than the authors of the weregild thought of descending into the heart and conscience. They did not bid the guiltladen penitent simply to go and sin no more, nor did they proclaim the law of the gospel, 'Owe no man anything but to love one another.' His penance was measured out by weeks and years, as the weregild was measured out by shillings and pence. So much time was to be passed without tasting anything but bread and water, so much time in lighter mortification. But there was that in the penitential rules which was not in the weregild system. If the clergy made any difference between persons, it was, that the higher the clerical rank of the person who committed the offence was, the heavier was to be his penance, whilst the layman was punished more heavily in proportion to the rank of the person injured. The lay system, in short, started from the notion that vengeance was to be bought. The church system started from the idea, that an evil action polluted the actor. Man acquired in this way a moral sense which he had not before. He learned that he was accountable for his actions to a judge higher than the king or the popular

assembly, and he learned too that ill-doing was an injury done to his own soul. The idea of purity and rectitude as an object of desire for the sake of a man's own wellbeing planted itself firmly amongst men. Hence, too, the strange forms taken in the Christian imagination by the spirits and deities of the old pagan mythology. The spirit of the wood or the stream came to be the ugly horned unsavoury devil of Christian mythology. The change was a sign of the new position assigned by man to the supernatural powers of his imagination. The spirits of whom the heathen told were beings to be propitiated and dreaded. The devil of the Christian's tale was a being with whom he himself had a conflict. There was war now not merely on the battle-field, but in the heart of every man, and the stories which he loved to tell were but the expression of his knowledge of a conflict, which, to however strange results it might lead in the immediate present, contributed incalculably to raise in the scale of moral beings the man who struggled against his lower

nature.

CHAP.

II.

Church Organisation.

As Christianity was more monastic in the end of the §11. sixth century than it had been in the fourth, it was also more monarchical. The authority of the pope indeed in the hands of Gregory the Great, by whom Augustine was sent to England, was not put forth with such highsounding claims to obedience as were afterwards heard. But it was becoming more and more the central force of Western Christendom. It gained strength from its being exercised from Rome, the seat of the older empire, from the personal qualities of many of the Popes, and from the tendency of the barbarian tribes to welcome a centre of unity in the midst of their weakness and their divisions. The very haughtiness with which the emissaries of Rome maintained the claims of him who sent them was an important element of success. When Augustine

СНАР.

II.

met the priests of the British Church, and alienated still
further, by remaining seated in their presence, those who
were already alienated from one who had preached the
gospel to the hated invaders, we may be sure that he
appeared more than ever worthy of respect in the eyes
of the Englishmen who accompanied him. When
Wilfrid reasoned against the clergy of Northumberland,
who had learned from Irish teachers different modes of
keeping Easter and of cutting the clerical tonsure than
those which were practised in the Roman church, and
which they declared themselves to have derived by tra-
dition from St. John, through Columba, he clenched his
argument, by claiming for the pope, as St. Peter's repre-
sentative, the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The
king, before whom he spoke, at once acknowledged the
force of his reasoning. If St. Peter, he said, was the
door-keeper of heaven, he would follow him lest he
should be shut out when he came to the gates. As
Christianity in the form in which it appeared broke
through all division of ranks, and knew nothing of eorls
and ceorls, of freeman, of serf, or of slave, so its institu-
tions rose above the civil institutions of the land. When
Archbishop Theodore organised the English Church at
the end of the seventh century, he created or adapted in-
stitutions which were wider and more universal than those
of the seven or eight kingdoms into which the original
tribes had by that time coalesced. From north to south
the priest took no account of divided nationality. The
man born on the banks of the Tweed might find his life's
work on the shores of the Southampton water, or in the
secluded East Anglian peninsula between the fens and
the sea.
As he passed backwards and forwards on his
mission of consolation and warning he was doing uncon-
scious work in levelling national distinctions by his

presence, as he was levelling distinctions of rank by his

creed.

CHAP.

II.

§ 12. The Church compared

with the

In some sort the work of the Christian Church was a repetition of the work done by the legislators of the Empire. They too had set themselves to sweep away Empire. differences, and to impose unity upon populations separated by far more deep-seated distinctions than those which kept apart the inhabitants of England. But whilst the Roman imposed his unity from without and from above, the Church sought to found it upon the heart and conscience. Grand and imposing as her institutions were, they blended with the civil institutions at the base. If the archiepiscopal presidency of Canterbury or York and the august supremacy of Rome had no parallel in the civil world, the parishes were simply ecclesiastical townships, and the bishoprics were conterminous with the kingdoms, or with the divisions of the kingdoms, which represented the older tribes.

So it came about that Church and State worked together harmoniously in England as they did nowhere else in Europe. The bishops and clergy had no memories of an older civilisation to defend, no conquered population to protect. The same English people were governed in one way for certain purposes, as they were governed in another way for other purposes. Very soon the entire clergy of England was English by birth and speech. Church and State acted and reacted on one another. The ideas of a higher and better order promulgated by the church, found their way insensibly into the minds of laymen. The lay state, with all its incongruities, did not appear so utterly incompatible with that better order as it would have seemed to priests who had not grown up in English homes and who did not converse in the English speech. This activity without disruption of harmony soon found its expression in

$13.

Church and

State.

CHAP.

II.

$14.

Union of

the King

literature and in increased exertion. Cadmon sang his song of the Creation. Bede, with English heart if with Roman speech, told the tale of the conquest, and the foundations were laid of the great Chronicle, which was to carry down to posterity the story of a people who were working out a history worthy of the telling. When the eighth century came, England had vigour to spare for other countries as well as for herself. English missionaries poured forth to carry the message of the gospel to the heathen, and, under the name of St. Boniface, the English Winfrid is still revered as the apostle to whom large populations in Germany owed. their conversion.

If the example of the Church contributed to draw the peoples more closely together, the incidents of warfare doms under tended in the same direction. In the early part of the Egbert. seventh century four small kingdoms, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, and Sussex, divided the south-east of England. The other three, on whom lay the burden of contending against the yet unconquered Celts of the West, Northumberland, Mercia, and Wessex, had far wider territories. The frontier was gradually pushed westward, and the effect of the Christian teaching was seen in the milder treatment of the conquered. The kings of these larger kingdoms, as the conflict with the Celts drew to a close, turned their arms upon one another. Sometimes Northumberland, sometimes Mercia, showed itself stronger than the rest. Then came the turn of Wessex. In the beginning of the ninth century, Egbert, King of the West Saxons, obtained the acknowledgment of his over-lordship from the whole English-speaking race, from the Channel to the Forth. Egbert's rule was not founded, like the dominion of the conquerors of Rome, upon the warlike predominance of a superior race. Neither was it founded on the voluntary amalgamation of many races.