EARLY ENGLISH CHURCH HISTORY.*
WHY has not an interesting Church history been long ago written? Why is it necessary to consult a number of monographs, in order to get a knowledge of its mere elements? If the vastness of the theme sufficiently explains this lack, why is it that no one has told, in even a tolerable fashion, the story of the conversion of Britain to Christianity ? We have got long past the time when historians of England refused, as Sir Francis Palgrave puts it, to treat the Church "with common honesty ;" but there is still wanting a book, written for the people as well as scholars, relating the won- derful history of the early English Church, and the "chains and sequences" by which its triumph was accomplished. The subject is deficient in no element of interest. The rapidity of the Con- quest; the spectacle of the powers of heathenism melting at a word from St. Augustine or St. Wilfrid ; the mystery floating round about the old religion ; its sturdy, brave adherents ; the strong, heroic souls, such as Paulinus and Theodore, standing out in the mists of time ; sweet, tender spirits, such as St. Cuthbert, which those rude times produced as naturally as the lobelia grows among the rocks or stones of the Rapids,—all unite to fill the theme with every charm which a historian could desire. Count M.ontalembert has told the story, in his own way,— but his own way, though fine, was not an Englishman's way. All is truth for him. It went against his nature to cast doubts on a really beautiful legend. To be critical came so near being sacri- legous in his eyes. He weaves into his narrative with equal confid- ence the statements of the veracious Adamnan or Bede, and those of the most extravagant of the Bollandists. Professor Bright's narrative has one great merit. It is simple and artless. We miss perhaps an abiding sense of awe at the vastness and marvellous character of the work which he describes. He is too content to be the paraphraser or translator of Bede. But there are the piquancy and directness of an old chronicle about some of his chapters, and we are not sorry that he does not belong to the order of historians who are never more at their ease than in decrying the original authorities to whom they are indebted for every scrap of infor- mation. Perhaps he plods away a little too monotonously at his tale of battles, murders, and sudden deaths, and we long for an occasional general reflection, if only as variety to the mass of small, pebbly facts. Hoffman, in one of his tales, says history should be "a ghost with a voice, coming from the past." The description not unfairly fits this narrative, which is a little too pale and colourless for a subject which sparkles with every variety of interest.
* Chnpters of Early English Church History. By William Bright, D.D. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
We should be glad if Englishmen were more familiar than they
are with the portraits of the national heroes and saints who are sketched in these pages. They would find that their earliest
ecclesiastical history has its glories, little thought of. Like most of his predecessors, such as Hook and Lappenberg, Professor Bright rather underestimates the first of the great figures which pass before us in his pages,—St. Augustine. He says truly enough of him that he was "not a Boniface, not an Anskar, not a Xavier, not a Martyn." Speaking of the questions of conscience which St. Augustine propounded to Gregory, Professor Bright adds, "One feels a sort of chill, a sensation akin to disappointment, in reading of his difficulties." This is scarcely the fit epitaph for the founder of English Christianity. He was not the ideal missionary ; he has been immured too long in the cloisters to escape narrow- ing influences ; he was by no means the man, one would have said, to impress the warlike 2Ethelberht. But let us judge by results, and we shall be forced to own that he was a man whose works far
transcended any saying recorded of him ; that he had striking prac-
tical talents ; that his was, as Montalembert describes it, a "patient and conciliating genius ;" and that his whole mind and bearing corresponded to the description we have of his appearance,— formam et personam patriciam, staturam proceram et arduam, adeo
tit a scapulis superernineret. Of Gregory all men have spoken well ; and Professor Bright has painted him with happy touches. Not
an allusion to him fails to "indicate a large and kindly nature ;" the very accounts we have of his physical appearance, his ruddy face, scanty, darkish hair, kindly look, stout stature, and beauti- fully shaped hands, speak of the very highest type of his race.
We are surprised that our author has not referred to the pretty legend embedded in the Purgatorio, to the effect that the soul of
Trajan passed into Gregory the Great. The two other striking figures in the history of that portion of the English Church which drew its sap from Rome are Theodore and Wilfrid. We prefer to quote Professor Bright's description of the former at the close of his life :—
" He probably felt that at his years he must work hard at this task, during what might remain to him of the twelve hours' of his day ; he had less time than a younger man for gently feeling his way, and gradually developing his plans. He was conscious of the gifts of a born ruler ; one does not think of him as of a saint, or a man who, because he 'loved,' in St. Augustine's exquisite phrase, could 'do whatever he liked,'—whose administrative success was the fruit of a genial nature, that gained obedience by the mere fact of evoking sympathy. This man of Tarsus was not like him whose heart was so tenderly ' enlarged ' towards all who were under his authority ; and the idea of discipline and obedience had received in the Conti- nental Church-system so ample a development, the hierarchy was so much regarded as an organ of governmental action, and so little, com- paratively, as a presentation to mankind of a Divine Pastor in his various operations of love,—that one expects to find in the character of a bishop brought up in it a certain hard authoritativeness, which re- minds one of the old Roman magistracy rather than of St. Chrysostom or St. Paul. But whatever Theodore was, whether we think him deficient or not in some characteristics of a shepherd of souls, we must recognise in him a man of vast practical ability, and sincere determi- nation to do his best for the Church. And not only can we appreciate what he did for England during an unexpectedly long episcopate, but we can understand how at its commencement he' was received as a public blessing by the kings and people, and was the first archbishop, Bede says, to whom all England submitted."
Of Wilfrid, the type of the restless, the versatile, the ambitious Churchman, our author speaks with enthusiasm. He is carried away by the Northumbrian's dazzling gifts. He does indeed admit St. 'Wilfrid's "imperiousness and egotism." But he does not stop long enough over his faults ; and be is too sure that the revolution which Wilfrid, with the aid of his countryman, Benedict Biscop, accomplished, was good, to appreciate in their fullness his rivals, whom the haughty Northumbrian prelate so slightingly treated. The key to his character is probably to be found in the prayer which, according to Richard of Hexham, he used to make ; he prayed to be free de in genii sad tarditate, et lingum rusticate. Wil- frid was, in fact, one of the great ruling and organising ecclesiastics whom Rome has never lacked. He wanted to introduce system and method ; he desired to see the Church strong and magnificent, as he had seen it at Rome and at Lyons; he was the patron of learning and architecture, the very ideal of the princely and liberal Churchman of the middle-ages. We own, however, the more interest in the de- velopment in England of the work begun by St. Columba, and we cannot be so sure as Professor Bright is that its extinction by reason of the influence exercised by Wilfrid at the Synod of Whitby was not a national calamity. True, the ascendancy of Latin Christianity brought system and order, which the Scotch or Irish Church sadly wanted. It brought magnificent churches and cathedrals, and wedded art to religion in stately nuptials. It introduced, as Mr. Green says, "those larger and humanising influences which contact with a wider world alone can give." But it will be ever a moot point whether it was well for the world, and England in particular, that King Oswi gave his judgment at the Synod of Whitby for Wilfrid's claim, and that Colman and his followers quitted the Holy Isle and sailed away, never to return, thus leaving England to the dominion of Rome, and severing her connection with Columba, to whose followers or heirs she mainly owed her conversion. The notion that the Scotch Church was heir to the Ephesine traditions may be, and probably was, a myth. But it was not wholly an error to assert that Columba, "the dove of the cell," was the direct heir of St. John. All that we read of him is in accordance with the nature of the be- loved discipline. His great followers, such as St. Cuthbert and St. Aidan, exhibited the fervour and tenderness of the Apostle whose rule they professed to obey. Bede speaks of St. Aidan as "a man of the utmost gentleness, piety, and moderation," and he did not lack firmness and boldness. All that we learn of St. Columba from his biographer, and from the legends which have clustered about him, give the idea of a large-minded, richly endowed nature,—a spiritual genius far rarer and deeper than St. Wilfrid, or in fact, any of the Latiuised missionaries. Montalembert is only just to him when he says that there was in him the making of "a sailor, soldier, orator, and poet." And the disciples whom he nurtured were cast in the same rare and large mould. They were totally free, so far as we can see, from the narrowness which is the common charge brought against the Church of Iona. They trusted to the arms of the Spirit far more than their Latin sup- planters. Rich endowments and gorgeous buildings were not to their taste ; they were content with humble edifices of wood. When Malachy, Archbishop of Bangor, began to build a church of stone, the lovers of the old ways remonstrated with him, say- ing, " Scoti sumus, non Galli. Quid opus erat opere tam superfluo, tam superb° ?"—a question indicative of the spirit of a Church which preferred living converts to stately cathedrals, and which for generations adhered to the practice of not accepting endow- ments. All that can be learned respecting the old Church of Iona is that it depended more on the spiritual power of indi- vidual men than on any system ; that its organisation was loose, and allowed free play to every variety of human gifts ; and that its founders were of a loftier, purer, and rarer type than those by whom they were succeeded. Monasticism flourished in the early Northumbrian Church, and yet it was not insepar- ably associated with celibacy. Women held a higher rank in the Scoto-Irish Church than in the English Church. The Coarbs, whose position was greater than that of a bishop, were apparently sometimes women. If there was less learning in the Church of Iona, there was more poetry about it. While the emissaries of Rome made friends with Kings and Queens, St. Cuthbert and St. Aidan were the priests of the people ; they were more human and less worldly, and the very legends about them speak of more lovable natures. What story is told of St. Wilfrid comparable in pathos to that which is related of Columba, —bow on the eve of his death he was moved deeply, even to tears, when he had to part with the old white horse of the monastery ? What poems have come down connected with the English saints comparable in sweetness to those in which the chief saint of the Scoto-Irish Church sings of his oak grove in Derry, and says of his favourite Arran, "To live within the sound of thy bells is to live in joy?"
Professor Bright is in many ways an excellent narrator, and we have little fault to find with his story. We cannot, however, say that he throws much light on the many difficult questions of ecclesiastical archmology which must crop up in a history of the early English Church. He speaks with a very uncertain sound about the existence of an English Christian Church before the coming of Augustine, and we are at a loss to know whether he agrees with Mr. Wright in thinking that it did not exist at all. His remarks on the growth of the parochial systen, another crux in English Church history, are learned, but somewhat pointless ; he leaves the reader in doubt as to his own opinion. But we should be sorry if reference to these omissions deterred any one from reading a very fascinating volume.
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