hended all Northumbria, or that part of England which lies north of the Humber, opposed the division of his see, and appealed to the pope. The decision of Agatho was in his favour, but it profited him little, for Egfred imprisoned him upon his return, and about a year after, upon his release, which was obtained through the intercession of Ebbe, abbess of Coldingham, he preached in the kingdom of Sussex, which had not before received Christianity. This so restored him to the favour of Theodore, and Alfred, king o Northumberland, that he recovered the sees of Hexham and York, but was again expelled, and again gained a favourable decision from the pope Alfred, however, would not allow him to enter his dominions, and it was not till after the death of that prince, and of his immediate successor, that Wilfrid was in his old age reinstated in a part of his preferments. church of Rome did, at an early period, try to extend its power where it could, is beyond all doubt; that it did in after times obtain a spiritual supremacy in England is equally unquestionable. The Roman Catholic, by proving the early date of these encroachments, touches not the broad principles which guided our church in throwing off all foreign authority; and the Protestant can never prove, by denying these points, that the pope did not afterwards possess the supreme power over the English church: while both incur the danger of neglecting the pursuit of truth, in endeavouring to establish their own opinions. These observations apply with no less strength to the discussions about the council of Cloveshoo, in 747, in which, though there seems no direct acknowledgment of the papal supremacy, yet since it was called in consequence of the letters of Zachary, there § 9. The history of Wilfrid has at- is every appearance of at least a great tracted much more notice than it seems deference to the bishop of Rome. Inett intrinsically to merit, on account of the and Henrys try to prove the independiscussions which it involves with re-dence of our church by a comparison gard to the appeal to Rome. But the question is one of curiosity, and really of very little importance. That the 1 The conversion of the Heptarchy was now completed. The order in which the several kingdoms had embraced Christianity was as follows: Kent, 596. Essex, 604. Northumbria, 627. East Angles, 631. Wessex, 634. Mercia, about 650. Sussex, 678. The Isle of Wight was the district which last received the doctrines of Christianity. of one of the canons with that of a synod held at Mentz, and transmitted to Cuthbert by Boniface: but were the proof as good as they esteem it, what purpose would it answer? We shall not be able to prove that our forefathers were Protestants, even if they had not then fully admitted the authority of the see of Rome. We shall not allow of the other canons there established, or suffer our prayers and psalms to be said in Latin, though "a man may devoutly The whole period occupied by these successive conversions consisted of less than ninety years. There is one particular feature which has been adduced as marking a want of simplicity in the individual missionaries, to whom we owe the bless-ficulty, and on the different sides of which conings of Christianity. It may be observed, that the conversions generally took place among the court before any progress had been made with the people, a circumstance so contrary to the tenour of the early history of the Gospel, that it has been presumed that the missionaries themselves were actuated by worldly rather than spiritual motives. The solution of this apparent difference is, perhaps, to be sought rather in the state of civilization of those to whom they went, than in the temper of the teachers. The apostles were themselves uneducated men, and addressed their arguments to more educated nations; these missionaries had probably themselves received superior educations, and were going into a country of semi-barbarians; of men possessed of little or no education; and they naturally directed their instructions to the most exalted and best educated members of the country. Would not prudence dictate this conduct? and is not the wisdom of its adoption borne out by the conduct of recent missionaries? 2 The whole question of the authority exercised by Rome over Saxon England is one of great dif clusions diametrically opposite may be drawn. 3 Lingard, note, i. 484. apply the intentions of his own heart to the things which are at present to be asked of God, and fix them there to the best of his power."1 collected elsewhere, before the end of the fourth century. And the numerous laws with regard to their payment, while they establish the right, prove that there was even then a difficulty of collecting them. § 10. The union of the several kingdoms of the Heptarchy would probably have been beneficial to the interests of § 11. The great benefit which Alfred Christianity, had not the succeeding conferred on his country, beyond the inroads of the Danes more than coun- military talent which he displayed in terbalanced this advantage. These his wars with the Danes, consisted in heathen invaders joined a considerable the introduction of literature and the portion of animosity against the Chris- establishment of laws. The inroads of tian clergy to their love of plunder; and, these northern hordes had overturned as much of the wealth of the country all institutions which might educate the was generally contained in the monas- inhabitants, and directed the attention teries, their savage attacks were chiefly of the English to warlike, rather than directed against these establishments, which possessed most of the learning, and much of the civilization which was left in England. peaceful studies; and even churchmen had become so ignorant, that few understood the services which they used, or could translate a Latin letter. The diffi(A.D. 855.) Ethelwulf, the father of culties against which Alfred had to Alfred, before his journey to Rome, made struggle were enormous; he had to disa grant of a tenth of all his possessions, cover the advantages of literature, and or liberated the tenth part of his pos- his own want of it, and to teach himself sessions from every royal service and even to read, and that at a time when contribution. It is not at all clear what books were scarce, and when most of the nature of this grant was; it has the libraries which had been formerly generally been interpreted as relating collected were destroyed. When he to tithes, but as tithes are spoken of came to the throne, he assembled around long before, there must either have now him, by great munificence, all the litebeen a regranting of them, or perhaps rary men whom he could find, and his they were now liberated from burdens first steps showed him how much his to which they were before exposed. countrymen had gone back in knowOne of the supposed canons of King ledge, since they were now unable to Edward the Confessor, which were pro-read those books which their own ancesbably drawn up after the days of Wil-tors had written. liam Rufus, states that tithes were introduced with Christianity, by Augustin, and there is no time in which they are mentioned, without being spoken of as due. When the first notice of them occurs in the excerptions of Ecgbright in 740, directions are given as to the disposal of them; and almost all the collections of canons which follow introduce the mention of them in the The Latin tongue was now generally unknown; and to obviate this difficulty, Alfred translated many books into the language of his country. In presenting Boëthius to the Saxons, he introduced many moral lessons and sentiments of his own, for our knowledge of which we are indebted to Mr. Turner; he published, too, in the same manner, Orosius and Bede; and that he might better instruct his higher clergy, he put forth a translation of the Pastoral of Gregory. Besides these, he appears to have been employed on dif ferent works and translations, and his general knowledge seems to have extended to many other subjects, as architecture, ship-building, and jewelry. For the education of his son Ethelweard, he established a public school, in which the young nobility were brought up, together with the heir of the crown; and so greatly did this and his other institutions raise the character of England for civilization, that Athelstan had the credit of educating in our island three kings of foreign countries, Alan of Bretagne, Louis of France, and Haco of Norway. Nor must it be forgotten that Alfred sent an embassy to the Syrian Christians of India, whose very existence has only been re-ascertained by modern communications. enter on the earlier part of the history of the English church, and confesses most readily that all his acquaintance with it is derived from secondary sources. Should any one think that this portion of the work ought rather to have been omitted altogether, than to have been thus treated, the writer, while he perfectly agrees with the better informed reader, begs him to consider, that this book is intended for those who do not possess much knowledge of these sub§ 12. The darkness which followed jects, and to remember, in his excuse, the reign of Athelstan was broken by two that few men are able to cope with antimen who succeeded each other in the quarian difficulties, and to enter on the see of Canterbury. Odo and Dunstan, discussion of subjects which are intewith their real zeal for Christianity, resting in the present day. With regard joined a great desire of extending the to the subject-matter, it must be acknowinfluence of the church with which their ledged that we possess little or no acown power was intimately blended. quaintance with British history, and that Their histories, however, have been the true history of our Saxon church is written by such over-zealous advocates, still, in great measure, a desideratum in that they have rendered even the good the catalogue of English authors. No they did suspected, through the multi- Roman Catholic writer can hope to satistude of miracles attributed to them. fy a Protestant, when the real question Modern historians have taken an oppo- is as to the introduction of those errors site direction; and the conduct of Dun- which the member of the church of Engstan, with regard to Edwi and Elgiva, land imputes to the other; and the requihas, without much foundation, been sites for forming an author suited to the worked up into a pathetic tale; while, task are so numerous, that we must on the other hand, the monks, who were wish, rather than hope, that such an inthe only historians, had good reason for dividual may be found. The whole of praising one who everywhere ejected the history of the British church has the canons, and placed the more newly been exhausted by Stillingfleet in his established orders in their monasteries. Origines Britannica; and to any one The Danes were, according to the policy who will examine that work, it will be of Alfred, gradually incorporated into apparent how little is known, and how the religion as well as civil government unimportant that little is; that is, unimof the country; and the kings of that portant as far as the present state of the nation appear not to have been behind- world is concerned. The man who is hand in enriching the church; so that fully acquainted with the history of the at the death of Edward the Confessor, Reformation may see more clearly what one-third of the land in England is sup- is taking place, or may happen, among posed to have been in the hands of Roman Catholic nations of our own ecclesiastical bodies.* days; he who has studied the events which occurred in the reign of Charles I. will be able to estimate more fully the present state of England and of those countries with which she is connected; but he who successfully wades through the whole church history of England, and its ecclesiastical affairs, to the middle of the thirteenth century, will find little more than a continued 1 Turner, 200. 2 Ibid. 148. 3 See $23. chain of contrivances, by which man4 Henry, in. 297; Spelman's Gloss. 396. A much more full one may be found in Hen- kind have set aside the law of heaven ry's History of England; Lingard's Anglo-Saxon through their own traditions, and subChurch; or Turner's History of the Anglo-Sax-stituted the commandments of men for § 13. The sketch here given will probably to most readers appear exceedingly defective, and the only fair apology which can be offered, must be sought for by regarding the writer, or the subject-matter of his writings. With respect to the first of these two, he is fully aware of his own inadequacy to ons. those of God. There are indeed some bright exceptions; and the lesson to be learnt even from such perversions is a useful one; for this fault is by no means confined to the church of Rome; it exists in human nature; and the blame which properly attaches to the church of Rome is, that in the dark periods she fostered this evil propensity; and when knowledge had dispelled the mist, for the sake of upholding her own infallibility, she refused to reject those customs and tenets, which, however understood and received by the well-informed part of society, can hardly be free from evil among the mass of the community. § 14. The aboriginal Briton may question the amount of the debt of gratitude which he owes to the church of Rome for his conversion; the Englishman, who derives his blood from Saxon veins, will be ungrateful if he be not ready to confess the debt which Christian Europe owes to Rome; and to profess, that whenever she shall cast off those inventions of men, which now cause a separation between us, we shall gladly pay her such honours as are due to the country which was instrumental in bringing us within the pale of the universal church of Jesus Christ. In the mean season, it may be instructive to point out the probable periods at which each of these differences were introduced among the Saxons, and to give some short historical notice with regard to the origin of some of them, a subject which may be omitted by the general reader if he find it uninteresting. The errors of the church of Rome generally originated from feelings in themselves innocent, if not laudable, but perverted by the admixture of human passions and inventions. § 15. To pray for the dead was the dictate of human nature, and the practice of the early church;' and no reasonable Christian will blame Dr. Johnson for the cautious manner in which he mentions his mother in his prayers; but in the hands of the church of Rome this feeling was soon directed to the unscriptural object of delivering the souls cf departed friends from purgatory, and the practice converted into a source of profit to the priesthood. The 'Bingham's Ant. vi. 671. history of this doctrine of purgatory is as follows:-"About the middle of the third century, Origen, among other Platonic conceits, vented this: That the faithful (the apostles themselves not excepted) would, at the day of judgment, pass through a purgatorial fire," to endure a longer or a shorter time, according to their imperfections. "In this conceit, directly contrary to many express texts of Scripture," he was followed by some great men in the church;-and "St. Augustin began to doubt whether this imagined purgation were not to be made in the interval between death and the resurrection, at least as to the souls of the more imperfect Christians. Towards the end of the fifth century Pope Gregory undertook to assert this problem;-four hundred years after, Pope John the Eighteenth, or, as some say, the Nineteenth, instituted a holyday, wherein he required all men to pray for the souls in purgatory; at length the cabal at Florence, 1439, turned the dream into an article of faith." The doctrine of a purgatory, of some sort, has been entertained by heathens, Mohammedans, and Jews, but there is no necessary connection between praying for the dead, and the belief in purgatory. The Greek church, for instance, prays for the dead, without admitting any idea of purgatory. Prayers and oblations for the dead were probably established in England from the first, and a short form of prayer to that effect is inserted in the canons of Cloveshoo;" with regard to the latter doctrine, the Saxon homilists generally refer to the awards of a final judgment, though traditional notices exist, in which there appears to be at first an indistinct, but afterwards more clear reference to purgatory.s Bede seems to have entertained an idea of the same sort: and 3 Bull's Serm. iii. Works, i. 76. 4 Bingham, vi. 688. 6 Johnson's Can. pref. xix. 6 Lord, according to the greatness of thy mercy, vouchsafe to him the joys of eternal light with thy grant rest to his soul, and for thine infinite pity saints. Johnson's Can. 747, 37. 7 Soames, 349, 16, 324. 8 There are also many places of punishment, Lingard. Ang.-Sax. Church, 255, (21,) in which souls suffer in proportion to their guilt, before the general judgment, and in which some are so far purified, as not to be hurt by the fire of the last 2 Works, xii. 445. day. See also Soames, Bamp. p. 344. 10, 12. § 17. Private or solitary mass11 was unknown in the early church,12 and for the first nine hundred years there is no form of ordaining priests, to offer mass for the living and the dead ;13 but Bede and Alcuin appear to have esteemed the sacrifice beneficial for the living,1 Bede even for the dead. The same opinion is expressed by Elfric in his sermon;15 and in the canons of Edgar, 960, the practice of saying mass, as an opus operatum,16 seems clearly to have been established.17 As the custom of paying adoration to the host, and the denial of the cup to the laity,1s did not Alcuin, in common with many others, of theology, give us every reason for supposed that the general conflagration concluding that this doctrine never of the world would form a purgatorial gained a footing in England before the fire, through which the souls which conquest. Lingard maintains that the escaped unsinged would pass into the language of Elfric is borrowed from abodes of bliss. But later writers, and Bertram,10 to which a Roman Catholic among the rest Alfred, adopted the po- would not object, but which Archbishop pular notions of purgatory, which were Parker deemed so favourable to the still very different from the opinions on opinion entertained by Protestants, that that subject, established as articles of he published it as conveying a meaning faith by the councils of Florence and corresponding nearly with the doctrines Trent. Departed souls between death of the church of England. and their final judgment were divided into four distinct places; the perfect were conveyed to heaven; the less pure to paradise; the impure, who died in penitence, were consigned to purgatorial flames; and the impenitent to hell. § 16. With regard to the doctrine of transubstantiation, the opinions of the early fathers concerning it may be seen in Waterland; and his account of the history of this tenet is thus given in a note: In the year 787, the second council of Nice began with a rash determination, that the sacred symbols are not figures or images at all, but the very body and blood. About 831, Paschasius Radbertus carried it further, even to transubstantiation, or somewhat very like to it. The name of transubstantiation is supposed to have come in about A.D. 1100, first mentioned by Hildebertus Cenomanensis of that time. (p. 689, edit. Benedict.) A.D. 1215, the doctrine was made an article of faith by the Lateran council, under Innocent the Third." How far this doctrine was admitted by the Anglo-Saxon church is discussed by Lingard, who shows that the canons, Bede, and Egbert, use expressions which a member of the church of England would not use; but these probably a Protestant might have adopted, if the question had never been controverted. Bede, however, introduces language which no one who believed the doctrine of transubstantiations could have admitted, particularly the words of St. Augustin, quoted in our twentyninth article; and the testimonies of Rabanus Maurus, and Joannes Scotus Erigena, whose tenets were probably derived from the English school 1 Soames, 325. 2 Ibid. 362. 3 Ibid. 328. 4 On all these questions see also Usher's Answer to a Jesuit's Challenge. 9 Elfric says, (Johnson's Canons, 957, § 37,) "Housel is Christ's body not corporally, but spiritually, not the body in which he suffered, but that body of which he spake, when he blessed passion, and said of the bread blessed, This is my bread and wine for housel, one night before his body; and again of the wine blessed, This is my blood, that is shed for many for the forgiveness of sins," &c. See also a sermon of his printed by the order of Archbishop Parker, under the title of a Testimony of Antiquity;" (Fox's Martyrs, vii. 380;) reprinted in part. in France, about the middle of the ninth century; 10 Bertram, or Ratram, was a monk of Corbey he wrote a tract, De Corpore et Sanguine Domini, published in English, 3d edit. Lond. 1686, see $313, b. 1117. The word missa, or mass, was originally a general name for every part of the divine service. (Bingham, Ant. v. 9, &c.) Its signification is the in the Latin church. same as the word missio, and it was the form used 'Ite missa est," at the dismission of the catechumens first, and then of the whole assembly afterwards. Baronius (sub anno 34,59) derives it from the Hebrew. It now denotes the consecrating the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, and offering that as an expiatory sacrifice for the quick and dead. 12 Bingham, vi. 721. 13 Ibid. i. 255. 15 P. 29. 16 Johnson's Can. 960, $ 35. 1717. It is there ordered," that the priest never celebrate mass alone, (sect. 35,) without some one to make responses for him," (sect. 37.) 66 That he never celebrate more than thrice in one day," (sect. 40,) or "without eating the housel, or consecrated elements." 18 In Peckham's Constitutions, 1281, it is ordered that the laity (Johnson's Can. sect. 1) be told that the wine which is given to them is not the 7 Note N, 492. Soames, 399, 4, and 406, 5. | sacrament, but mere wine, to be drunk for the 6 Works, viii. 235. 6 Ibid. vii. 182. |