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were seven or eight at the time when Gregory the Great became pope.

      Conversion of Britain.

      Gregory, while still a simple monk, had been struck with the beauty of some Angles whom he saw one day in the slave market of Rome. When he learned who they were he was grieved that such handsome beings should still belong to the kingdom of the Prince of Darkness, and, had he been permitted, he himself would have gone as a missionary to their people. Upon becoming pope he sent forty monks to England from one of the monasteries that he had founded, placing a prior, Augustine, at their head and designating him in advance as Bishop of England. The heathen king of Kent, in whose territory the monks landed with fear and trembling (597), had a Christian wife, the daughter of a Frankish king. Through her influence the monks were kindly received and were assigned an ancient church at Canterbury, dating from the Roman occupation before the German invasions. Here they established a monastery, and from this center the conversion, first of Kent and then of the whole island, was gradually effected. Canterbury has always maintained its early preëminence and may still be considered the religious capital of England.[33]

       Ancient Church of St. Martin's, Canterbury

      

      The Irish monks.

      Augustine and his monks were not, however, the only Christians in the British Isles. Britain had been converted to Christianity when it was a Roman province, and some of the missionaries, led by St. Patrick (d. about 469), had made their way into Ireland and established a center of Christianity there. When the Germans overran Britain and reheathenized it, the Irish monks and clergy were too far off to be troubled by the barbarians. They knew little of the traditions of the Roman Church and diverged from its customs in some respects. They celebrated Easter upon a different date from that observed by the Roman Church and employed a different style of tonsure. Missionaries from this Irish church were busy converting the northern regions of Britain, when the Roman monks under Augustine began their work in the southern part of the island.

      Conflict between the Roman Church and the Irish monks.

      There was sure to be trouble between the two parties. The Irish clergy, while they professed great respect for the pope and did not wish to be cut off from the rest of the Christian Church, were unwilling to abandon their peculiar usages and accept those sanctioned by Rome. Nor would they recognize as their superior the Archbishop of Canterbury, whom the pope had made the head of the British church. The pope, on his part, felt that it was all-important that these isolated Christians should become a part of the great organization of which he claimed to be the head. Neither party would make any concessions, and for two generations each went its own way, cherishing a bitter hostility toward the other.

      Victory of Roman Church.

      At last the Roman Church won the victory, as it so often did in later struggles. In 664, through the influence of the king of Northumbria who did not wish to risk being on bad terms with the pope, the Roman Catholic form of faith was solemnly recognized in an assembly at Whitby, and the leader of the Irish missionaries sadly withdrew to Ireland.

       Map of Christian Missions

      

      The king of Northumbria, upon opening the Council of Whitby, said "that it was proper that those who served one God should observe one rule of conduct and not depart from one another in the ways of celebrating the holy mysteries, since they all hoped for the same kingdom of heaven." That a remote island of Europe should set up its traditions against the customs sanctioned by the rest of Christendom appeared to him highly unreasonable. This faith in the necessary unity of the Church is one of the secrets of its strength. England became a part of the ever-growing territory embraced in the Catholic Church and remained as faithful to the pope as any other Catholic country, down to the defection of Henry VIII in the early part of the sixteenth century.

      Early culture in England.

      The Venerable Bede.

      The consolidation of the rival churches in Great Britain was followed by a period of general enthusiasm for Rome and its literature and culture. Lindisfarne, Wearmouth, and other English monasteries became centers of learning unrivaled perhaps in the rest of Europe. A constant intercourse was maintained with Rome. Masons and glassmakers were brought across the Channel to replace the wooden churches of Britain by stone edifices in the style of the Romans. The young clergy were taught Latin and sometimes Greek. Copies of the ancient classics were brought from the continent and reproduced. The most distinguished man of letters of the seventh and early eighth centuries was the English monk Bæda (often called The Venerable Bede, 673–735), from whose admirable history of the Church in England most of our information about the period is derived.[34]

      Irish missionaries on the continent.

      St. Columban and St. Gall.

      23. From England missionaries carried the enthusiasm for the Church back across the Channel. In spite of the conversion of Clovis and the wholesale baptism of his soldiers, the Franks, especially those farthest north, had been very imperfectly Christianized. A few years before Augustine landed in Kent, St. Columban, one of the Irish missionaries of whom we have spoken, landed in Gaul. He went from place to place founding monasteries and gaining the respect of the people by his rigid self-denial and by the miracles that he performed. He even penetrated among the still wholly pagan Alemanni about the Lake of Constance. When driven away by their pagan king, he turned his attention to the Lombards in northern Italy, where he died in 615.[35] St. Gall, one of his followers, remained near the Lake of Constance and attracted about him so many disciples and companions that a great monastery grew up which was named after him and became one of the most celebrated in central Europe. Other Irish missionaries penetrated into the forests of Thuringia and Bavaria. The German church looks back, however, to an English missionary as its real founder.

      St. Boniface, the apostle to the Germans.

      In 718, about a hundred years after the death of St. Columban, St. Boniface, an English monk, was sent by the pope as an apostle to the Germans. After four years spent in reconnoitering the field of his future labors, he returned to Rome and was made a missionary bishop, taking the same oath of obedience to the pope that the bishops in the immediate vicinity of Rome were accustomed to take. Indeed absolute subordination to the pope was a part of Boniface's religion, and he became a powerful agent in promoting the supremacy of the Roman see.

      Under the protection of the powerful Frankish mayor of the palace, Charles Martel, Boniface carried on his missionary work with such zeal that he succeeded in bringing all the older Christian communities which had been established by the Irish missionaries under the papal control, as well as in converting many of the more remote German tribes who still clung to their old pagan beliefs. His energetic methods are illustrated by the story of how he cut down the sacred oak of Odin at Fritzlar, in Hesse, and used the wood to build a chapel, around which a monastery soon grew up. In 732 Boniface was raised to the dignity of Archbishop of Mayence and proceeded to establish, in the newly converted region, the German bishoprics of Salzburg, Regensburg, Würzburg, Erfurt, and several others; this gives us some idea of the geographical extent of his labors.

      Boniface reforms the church in Gaul and brings it into subjection to the pope.

      After organizing the German church he turned his attention, with the hearty approval of the pope and the support of the Frankish rulers, to a general reformation of the church in Gaul. Here the clergy were sadly demoralized, and the churches and monasteries had been despoiled of much of their property in the constant turmoil of the time. Boniface succeeded, with the help of Charles Martel, in bettering affairs, and through his efforts the venerable church of Gaul, almost as old as that of Rome itself, was brought under the supremacy of the pope. In 748 the assembled bishops of Gaul bound themselves to maintain the Catholic unity of faith and follow strictly the precepts of the vicar of St. Peter, the pope,

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