Initial from the MS. of Cadmon.

time nearly our whole Literature had Religion for its theme. I mean by Religion faith in а beneficent Creator, to whom, as supremely wise, just, and merciful, man ascribes the best qualities he can conceive, and to whose likeness he then seeks to conform himself; loving and serving all that he thinks highest in his God, who is the source of every good, and the helper of all faithful effort to draw near to Him. In most men this aspiration is associated with belief that the immaterial part, which yearns to be near God, survives to attain a heaven of the happiness it rightly sought. In every age and country, human nature has been able to conceive the excellence of God only by ascribing to Him all that man thinks best, and to conceive the happiness of an attained heaven only by associating it with human experiences of the highest bliss. Even though more be revealed by God himself, man's character determines how he shall receive the revelation, and we understand a people best when looking 65-VOL. II.

life which is the special concern of Religion.

Of the strength of a religious feeling in this country before Christian times, Stonehenge and Avebury bear witness. No man knows when or how those mighty stones, which defy time, were lifted to their places; only the stones themselves tell us that in a day long past, of which we have no other record, the people of this island gave their chief strength to the service of religion. Their bodies perished, their homes passed away, their form of worship is forgotten, but they left imperishable record of a soul of worship that was in them.

Two Epistles to the Corinthians were ascribed to Clement, who was called the third bishop of Rome after the apostles, and said to have been fellowlabourer with St. Paul at Philippi. In the first of these, Paul is said to have "travelled even to the extreme boundaries of the West." This has been taken to mean that he visited Britain. Jerome, at the end of the fourth century, said that St. Paul imitated the sun in going from one ocean to the other, and that his labours extended to the West. Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrus in the fifth century, continuing the tradition, spoke of Paul as having brought salvation to the islands of the Ocean, and in his first discourse on Laws included the Britons among converts of the apostles. There was such a

tradition and there seems really to have been early preaching of Christianity here, if the remote Britain were not used as a mere figure of rhetoric. Origen, speaking in the earlier half of the third century, said that "the power of the Saviour's kingdom reached as far as Britain, which seemed to be another division of the world." Old tradition ascribed to a King Lucius, who died in the year 201, the building of our first church on the site of St. Martin's at Canterbury. Britons are said to have died for the Christian faith; and Alban, said to have been beheaded A.D. 305 near the town now named after him St. Alban's, is described as the first British martyr. Three British bishops, one being from York and two from London, were at the first Council of Arles, A.D. 314. Some of our bishops had come to the remote west as pious missionaries, others were Celtic converts. One of these teachers, Morgan, who translated his name

station was in the Hebrides, upon the rocky island of Iona, which has an area of 1,300 Scotch acres, and lies off the south-western extremity of the island of Mull. After him it was called (IonaColumb-kill) Icolmkill; and the religious community there gathered by him, at first rudely housed, became the head-quarters of religious energy for the conversion of North Britain, the missionaries being devout native Celts, gifted with all the bold enthusiasm of their race, who were in relation rather with the Eastern than the Western Church.

The English settlers in Northumbria were Christianised by a Celtic priest, said to have been a son of Urien, who was educated at Rome, and took the name of Paulinus. But he and his fellowmissionaries promised temporal advantage to their converts, and when in the year 633 they suffered a serious defeat in battle, these fiercely cast off their

into Pelagius (meaning "born by the sea-shore"), and who was an old man in the year 404, ventured on independent speculations that found not a few followers, and gave for a long time afterwards much trouble to the orthodox. To combat Pelagianism, and add to the number of converts from the heathen, two bishops from Gaul, Germanus and Lupus, came as successful missionaries into Britain in the year 429. Patricius, known as St. Patrick, is said to have been born of a Christian family at Kilpatrick, near Dumbarton, in the year 372, and to have been ordained priest by Germanus before his preaching among the Irish Gaels.

There were then scattered among the people of Ireland and Scotland devoted men of their own race, known as Culdees, servants and worshippers of God, who were engaged in diffusing Christianity. Patrick added to the energy of the work done by these men in Ireland. It was an Irish abbot, Columba, who in the year 563 passed into Scotland, and from the age of about forty to the age of seventy-five worked as a Christian missionary on the mainland and in the Hebrides. His chief

Then

new creed, and Paulinus fled from them. help was asked from the followers of Columba. The first man who was sent out from Iona returned hopeless; but they were strenuous workers at Iona, who would not accept failure. Another, Aidan, took the place of his more faint-hearted brother, and formed in an island on the Northumbrian coast a missionary station upon the pattern of that in the Hebrides. This was at Lindisfarne, chief of the Farn Islands, named from the Lindi, a rivulet there entering the sea. Lindisfarne is a little more than two miles across from east to west, and scarcely a mile and a half from north to south, attached at low water as a peninsula to the coast, from which it is about two miles distant. It belongs to Durham, although really part of Northumberland, and is about nine miles from Berwick-on-Tweed. The island is treeless, chiefly covered with sand, rising to a rocky shore on the north and east. The fertile ground in it is not more than enough for one farm. Here the Culdees established themselves in such force that the place came to be called Holy Island, and from this point they worked effectually for the

Christianising of the north of England. They fed and comforted the poor, trusting instead of fearing the wild men they sought to soften, went up into their hills to live with them as comrades, and taught religion in a form that blended itself with the spiritual life of man, instead of depending for an outward prosperity on smiles of Fortune. The Culdees prospered in their work, an abbey rose in Lindisfarne, and there was a bishopric established there, which about the year 900, when the Danes ravaged the coast, was removed to Durham.

Aidan died at Lindisfarne in the year 651, and it was he who consecrated the first woman who in Northumbria devoted herself wholly to religious life, and wore the dress of a nun-Heia, who founded the religious house at Herutea. In this she was followed by the abbess Hilda, who is associated with the history of Cadmon's "Paraphrase," the grand religious poem with which our literature opens.

Hilda, daughter of Hereric, nephew to King Eduin, had been one of the converts made by the preaching of Paulinus. Hilda's sister Heresuid, was mother to the king of the East Angles. Hilda went, therefore, into East Anglia, and then designed to follow her sister when she took the religious vow at a monastery in France. But Bishop Aidan summoned Hilda back to the north, and gave her a site for a religious house on the north side of the river Wear. There she was called by Bishop Aidan, in the year 650, a year before his death, to be abbess in the religious house founded by Heia at Herutea, now Hartlepool, Heia then going to another place, probably Tadcaster. Eight years afterwards, when Aidan's successor, Finan, was Bishop of Lindisfarne,

THE WEST CLIFF AT WHITBY.

Hilda left Hartlepool to establish a religious house as a new missionary station on the west cliff at Whitby, then called Streoneshalh. Presided over by a woman, its first founder, this was a house established on the pattern of Iona, in which men

Her pru

there rich, and none poor, all things being in common to all, and none having any property. dence was so great, that not only persons of the middle rank, but even kings and princes, sometimes asked and received her advice. She obliged those who were under her direction to attend so much to the reading of the Holy Scriptures, and to exercise themselves so much in works of justice, that many might very easily be there found fit for ecclesiastical duties, that is, to serve at the altar. In short, we afterwards saw five bishops taken out of that monastery, all of them men of singular merit and sanctity. Thus this handmaiden of Christ, Abbess Hilda, whom all that knew her called Mother, for her singular piety and grace, was not only an example of good life to those that lived in her monastery, but gave occasion of salvation and amendment to many who lived at a distance, to whom the happy fame was brought of her industry and virtue." She died in the year 680, after six or seven years of ill-health, at the age of sixty-six, having spent the first half of her life to the age of thirty-three in the secular habit, and devoted the rest wholly to religion.

Cadmon's poem was written in the Whitby monastery during Hilda's rule over it, that is to say, in the time between its foundation, A.D. 658, and her death, A.D. 680. The first buildings on the Whitby cliff were very simple, but in course of time a more substantial abbey took its place. It was destroyed by the Northmen in the latter half of the ninth century, rebuilt, and again destroyed. The ruins now upon the site first occupied by Abbess Hilda are of a rebuilding in which the oldest part is of the twelfth century.