:BEDE'S ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH NATION.* 'Tens is a
retranslation of Bede's work, prefaced by a few and somewhat meagre notes about Bede himself, and furnished with ,paginal annotations which, though nothing unusually profound, will assist the average reader in comprehending the allusions, &o., in the text. I3ede's History is a work which few have road ; most of the few who know it at all know it only as quoted by the (modern writers who have used it liberally. If a reader merely wants to learn a little something of the history it treats of, he can attain that object easier and safer at the hands of the moderns ; but for realizing the changes which have come over the spirit of the times, there is nothing like reading in some old, original author like this. The face of the earth is changed, and the habits of the men who live on it, and the Manner of their thoughts and their policies. New ideas have arisen, have gathered strength, have slowly and surely sapped the constraints of ancient use, have become in their turn the fetters which first restrained and
'ultimately yielded to the innovating spirit of a succeeding age ;
and all this has been repeated over and over again in the long interim. Bede, a monk of Jarrow, was finishing his history, he says, in 731, being then in his fifty-ninth year ; he died in 735. He calls it the 285th year from the coming of the Angles
into Britain, and it would be over 200 years since the last
of the Roman power was drawn off. Bode styles the island " Britain," but the people " gene Auglorum," and '44 Anglorutn sive Saxon= gene." Antiquarians have differed about the extent to which the conquered Celts were replaced by the overmastering people. Mr. Freeman in his Norman Conquest argues that the strife was one of extermination and 'migration ; while others contend that a large number of Britons 'remained among their conquerors, blending their stock with the Teutonic, to produce us who speculate on these things. If anything is to be argued from the tone in which Bede writes, it would be
that there was no appreciable amount of British blood iu the Angle population of his time. However that may have been, one cannot help noticing the unpleasant manner in which the Celts are spoken of by Anglo-Saxon writers, whether iu jest or in -earnest. We have, for instance, as a piece of the" chaff " of the time, the story of St. Guthlac, looking out of window, and discom- forted because he thought he saw two Britons, but becoming reassured when he perceived that the noxious shapes were only two devils. Bede relates the massacre of the British Christian clergy at Bangor with the air of cue who considers their fate not ontirely to be deprecated.
* Bsele's Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation, A Now Translation. By the Itey. L. Gidley, Loudon; Parker. Augustine came on his mission eighty years or so before Bede was born, and Bede had been laid to rest for sixty or seventy years more before the Danes came with their inroads over the land. After honouring the early British martyrs, Bede relates that the British people fell into all manner of unutterable wickedness, crowned by the omission of not preaching Christianity to the nation of the Angles "inhabiting Britain with themselves." " The divine goodness, however, deserted not the people whom it foreknow, but destined much more worthy heralds of the truth for the aforesaid nation, through whom it might believe." He writes down the Britons of what is now England and Wales as wholly perverse in the matter of the Easter Computation, whereas Aldan, of the Scotch sect, is kindly dealt with thus :— " Moreover, this discordance of observance of the Paschal Feast, whilst Aldan lived, was patiently tolerated by all, since they understood that, although he could not keep the Paschal Feast contrary to the custom of those who had sent him, he yet took care diligently to fulfil the works of faith, piety, and love, according to the usual manner of all holy men, wherefore he was deservedly beloved by all, even by those who thought differently conoerning the Paschal Feast."
We do not learn much from Bede about the way in which folks lived in England when he wrote, but we have the materials for that knowledge in our libraries ; and can read there, if we choose, the laws and " dooms " which were in force. Looking back on very ancient times, we often find ourselves unwittingly thinking of them as if things wore as ancient then as their memory is now ; whereas England in Bede's days, for instance, must have had much of the rawness of a modern colony. The contrast between the ways of living then and now strike one less forcibly than that between the ways and habits of thinking. What a tremendous difference, for instance, is made by the mere increase in popula- tion. There was plenty of elbow-room then ; no need of any doctrines like Malthus' or Mill's ; whatever folk might endure for sheer lack of inventions in palliation of the rigours of nature, they were not crowded off into misery and death. as sonic are now. Again, what a wonderful amount of speculation and generally of altered manner of thinking came in, as living gradually ceased to be so much of a hand-to-hand contest between each man and prim- eval earth and outer elements I You may take " the picturesque " as a straw on the current. Now-a-days we make special journeys to see portions of primeval earth in static quo, and say how pic- turesque she is. Bede need not have gone very far. Did he over regard his fens, rocks, and forests as picturesque ? He never conceived the idea of any one making a picture of anything of the kind. Perhaps he was iu some sense touched by beauties in what met his eyes, and being a devout man, thanked God there- for ; but as yet, in the struggle with primeval earth, primeval earth possessed so very much of the battle-field that men found no will or breathing-space for admiring her.
A theologian might investigate the doctrines held by the Chris- tians of Bede's days, but such an inquiry would not be much to our purpose hare. There is much in this history which in this age we set down as narrow, illiberal, hisresis ire cortiee ; pages on pages, for instance, devoted to controversies about the mode of tonsure and the computation of Easter. The charge against the British Church was that they did not keep the Sunday of the Pass- over at its proper time, " but from the fourteenth to the twentieth day of the moon .. Moreover, they did many other things contrary to ecclesiastical unity." We may smile at this sort of thing now- a-days, but, there being " a deal of human nature in man," it re- mains to be shown that we are any better than these predecessors of ours. There are plenty of sects now who wrangle for all manner of details remote from the essence ; they stickle for matters of cere- monial or minutiae in the garment by which a man's belief is to clothe his soul, and are each met by a complementary sect attach- ing precisely the same importance to the thing in the negative sense of destroying it. When Milton (Hist. E viand, iv.) wrote of the bishops whom Augustine was empowered to constitute in Britain,—" Who and what they were may be guessed by the stuff which they brought with them, vessels and vestments for the altar, copes, relics, and for the Archbishop Austin a pall to say mass in; to such a rank superstition that age was grown,"--Milton makes Re much of the vessels and vestments as those he censured, though in the opposite direction. There are many ways of being narrow or illiberal ; you may be narrow and illiberal in your way of insisting on breadth and liberality. Bede and the men of his day had not the time or the opportunity which we have for speculation and theorizing. They went pretty much upon the concrete, and could not be expected to abstract any more than a modern backwoodsman. In sequence they held grave dis- cussions over various matters of curious detail, such as those named by Augustine in the queries which he addressed to
Gregory, and which Hume styled indecent and ridiculous. Of intoleranoe we do not find much in Bede's pages, excepting always the treatment of the British Church. The English Church in his day was a missionary Church as yet, working vigorously for its own existence. Intolerance, as we know, came later, with leisure and power ; but even as regards the article of our tolera- tion, on which we plume ourselves, ought we not, before we write it all down to the credit side of the account, to inquire whether or no any of it is due simply to indifference.
As to the miracles, signs, and wonders recorded by Bede, one cannot help observing that the downright miracles, not very many in number, are related of the remote times of Alban, and so forth ; when Bede gets down to wonders coming to Lim at third or second-hand, they are merely cures wrought by the relics and bones of departed saints, or visions witnessed, which latter indeed may be found in publications of very modern date. The most remarkable visions related by Bode are those of Furseus and Drycthelm. Furseus, a saint from Ireland, was snatched from the body and conducted by angels to where he witnessed the countenances of the angelic host, and was also shown the four fires which are hereafter to consume the world, and which were then burning those who had sinned by unlawful pleasure. As his angel guides opened for him a way through these flames, the unclean spirits around flung a tormented soul at him, which hit him on the head and burnt his shoulder and jaw ; and Furseus bore the scar with him to his grave. Drycthelm's vision is very well known, and has been often recounted by writers in many later centuries. He was taken in the spirit to where he beheld the condition of souls in purgatory :— " A valley of great breadth and depth, and also of infinite length, which, lying on our left, showed one of its sides exceedingly terrible with burning flames, the other not less intolerable with raging hail and the cold of snows blowing through and sweeping over every part of it. Moreover, each side was full of the souls of men, which appeared to be -east by turns from one side to the other, as though by the force of a tempest. For when the wretches could not endure the violence of the excessive heat, they sprang forth into the midst of the cruel cold ; and when neither there could they find any rest, they sprang back again to be burnt into the midst of the inextinguishable flames."
Drycthelm, after his return to the body, became a monk, and was accustomed to mortify his flesh by standing up to his neck in the river, even when the ice was thick, in the depth of winter- time ; and when the bystanders would express their wonder how he could endure such severe cold, " 6 he used simply to answer, for ho was a man of plain wit and reserved nature, ' I have seen greater cold.'" And when they said, ` It is wonderful that you will practise such severe discipline,' he used to answer, I have seen greater severity.' Perhaps Drycthelm might have done better with his body than to subject it to these sufferings, but he might have done worse. However, we cannot stay now to discuss the import and the value of early Christian austerities ; if any one would like to read a few noble and true thoughts about the matter, lot him turn to Mr. Froude's essay on " The Lives of the Saints," printed among his Short Studies on Great Subjects.
We cannot refrain from quoting a sentence in the concluding summary, in which Bede notes up the state of the island at the hour of laying down his pen :— "Favoured by this peace and serenity of the times, many in the nation of the Northumbrians, nobles as well as private persons, having laid aside their weapons, are more intent on receiving the tonsure and binding themselves and their children by monastic vows, than on the exercise of warlike arts. What results this state of things will have posterity will see."
What the old ecclesiastic thought, in that year 731, is tolerably evident ; and so, great as have been the changes wrought in the thoughts of men by the fourteen hundred and forty years between 731 and 1871, here is one item upon which a posterity, a thousand years later than the posterity who saw the outfall of the things he was speculating upon, has, after all sorts of theorizations, revulsions, and millenniary anticipations, just dropped upon a similar mental attitude.
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