PART IV.

In the year 596 Gregory sent off a party of monks as missionaries to the English Saxons. The head of them was Augustine, who had been provost (that is, the highest person after the abbot)[59] of the monastery to which the pope himself had formerly belonged. And, at the same time, Gregory directed the manager of his estates in France to buy up a number of captive Saxon youths, and to place them in monasteries, that they might learn the Christian faith, and might afterwards become missionaries to their own countrymen.

[59] See page 150.

When Augustine and his brethren had got as for as the south of France, they heard many terrible stories of the English, so they took fright at the thought of going among such savages, whose very language was unknown to them; and Augustine went back to Rome to beg that they might be allowed to give up their undertaking. But Gregory would not consent to this. He encouraged them to go on, and he gave Augustine letters to some French kings and bishops, desiring them to assist the missionaries, and to supply them with interpreters who understood the language of the Saxons. Augustine, therefore, returned to the place where he had left his companions. They made their way across France, and in 597 he landed, with about forty monks, in the Isle of Thanet.

Ethelbert lived at Canterbury, the capital of the Kentish kingdom, at no great distance from the place where the missionaries had landed. On receiving notice of their arrival, he sent to desire that they would remain where they were until he should visit them; and within a few days he went to them. The meeting was held in the open air; for Ethelbert had a superstitious fear that they might do him some mischief by magical arts, if he were to trust himself under a roof with them. The missionaries advanced in procession, with a silver cross borne before them, and displaying a picture of the crucified Saviour; and, as they slowly moved onwards, they chanted a prayer for their own salvation and that of the people to whom they had been sent. Ethelbert received them courteously, and desired them to sit down; and then Augustine made a speech, telling the king that they were come to preach the word of life to him and to his subjects. "These are indeed fair words and promises which you bring with you," said Ethelbert; "but, because they are new and uncertain, I cannot at once take up with them, and leave the faith which I and all my people have so long observed. But as you have come from far, and as I think you wish to give us a share in things which you believe to be true and most profitable, we will not show you unkindness, but rather will receive you hospitably, and not hinder you from converting as many as you can to your religion."

He then granted them a lodging in his capital, and ordered that they should be supplied with all that they might need. As they drew near to Canterbury, they again displayed the silver cross, and the banner on which the Saviour was painted; and they entered the city in procession, chanting a litany which Gregory had made for the people of Rome, during the great plague which carried off pope Pelagius.

A little way outside the city they found a small church, which had been built in the days of the old British Christianity, and in which Luidhard had since held his service for Queen Bertha and the Christians of her court. It was called by the name of St. Martin; for even before the Saxon invasion his name had become so famous that many churches were called after it; and we may well believe that Queen Bertha, on arriving from France, was glad to find that the church in which she was to worship had long ago been named in honour of the great saint of her own land. There Augustine and his brethren now held their service; and the sight of their holy, gentle, and self-denying lives soon drew many to receive their instructions. Ethelbert himself was baptized on Whitsunday, 597, and, although he would not force his people to profess the Gospel, he declared himself desirous of their conversion.

Gregory had desired Augustine, if he met with success in the beginning of his mission, to return from Britain into France and be consecrated as a bishop. He now obeyed this direction, and was consecrated at Arles; and without any delay he again crossed the sea, and renewed his labours among the Saxons. Such was his progress in the work of conversion, that at Christmas of the year in which he first landed in Britain ten thousand persons were baptized in one day. Four years later, Gregory made him an archbishop; and he sent him a fresh body of clergy to help him, with a large supply of books, vestments, and other things for the service of the Church. He also gave him instructions how to proceed, so as to advance the true faith without giving needless offence to the prejudices of the heathen.

Augustine's chief difficulties, indeed, were not with the Saxons, but with the clergy of the ancient British Church, whom he could not succeed in bringing to an agreement. We must not lay the blame wholly on either side; if the Britons were somewhat jealous and obstinate, Augustine seems to have taken too much upon himself in his way of dealing with them. But, whatever his faults may have been, we are bound to hold his memory in honour for the zealous and successful labours by which the Gospel was a second time introduced into the southern part of this island. Before his death, in 604, he had established a second bishop for Kent, in the city of Rochester, and one at London, which was then the capital of the kingdom of Essex. And by degrees, partly by the followers of St. Augustine, and partly by the Scotch monks of Icolumbkill,[60] all the Saxon kingdoms of England were converted to the Christian faith.

[60] See page 139.

In the same year with Augustine, Gregory also died, after long and severe illness, which obliged him for years to keep his bed, but could not check his activity in watching over the interests of religion.

Gregory had intended that Augustine should be archbishop of London, because in the old Roman days London had been the chief city of Britain; and it might seem natural that the chief bishop of our Church should now take his title from the capital of all England. But when Gregory sent forth his missionaries he did not know that England had been divided by the Saxons into several kingdoms. In consequence of this division of the country, Augustine, instead of becoming archbishop of London, fixed himself in the capital of Kent, the first kingdom which he converted, and then the most powerful of all. Hence it is that his successors, the primates of all England, to this day, are not archbishops of London but of Canterbury.

And, although Canterbury be not now a very large town, it is a very interesting place, and is full of memorials of its first archbishop. The noble cathedral, called Christ Church, stands in the same place with an ancient Roman-British church which Augustine recovered from heathen uses and consecrated in honour of the Saviour. Close to it are the remains of the archbishop's palace, built on the same ground with the palace of Ethelbert, which he gave up to the missionaries. A little church of St. Martin still stands on a rising ground outside the city, on the spot where Bertha and Luidhard had worshipped before the arrival of Augustine, and where he and his brethren celebrated their earliest services. And, although it has been rebuilt since then, we may still see in its walls a number of bricks which by their appearance are known to be Roman,--the very same materials of which the little church was built at first, while the Romans were yet in Britain, fourteen centuries and a half ago; nay, it is even supposed that some part of the masonry is Roman too. Between St. Martin's and the cathedral lay the great monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul, which Augustine began to build. He died before it was finished; but, as soon as it was ready, his body was removed to it, and in it Queen Bertha and her husband were afterwards buried. After a time the name of the monastery was changed to St. Augustine's, and for hundreds of years it was the chief monastery of all England. The Reformation in the sixteenth century put an end to monasteries; and the buildings of St. Augustine's went through many changes, until in the year 1844 the place was turned to a purpose similar to that which Augustine and Gregory had at heart when they undertook the conversion of England; for it is now a college for training missionaries. And, as Gregory wished that Saxon boys should be brought up with a view to converting their countrymen, so there are now at St. Augustine's College young men from distant heathen nations, receiving an education which may fit them hereafter to become missionaries of the Church of England to their brethren.[61] Nor is the good Gregory forgotten in the city which owes so much to him; for within the last few years a beautiful little church called by his name has been built, close to the college of St. Augustine.

[61] Among those who were at the College when this volume was first printed was Kalli, the Esquimaux, of whom an account has since been written by the Rev. T. B. Murray, and published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. He afterwards went to the diocese of Newfoundland, where he died of consumption.

Here this little book must close. It ends with the replanting of the Gospel in our own land. And, if hereafter the story should be carried further, some of its brightest pages will be filled by the labours of the missionaries who went forth from England to preach the faith of Christ in Germany and the adjoining countries.