TO A.D. 605.] COLUMBA. AUGUSTINE. 15 Patricius, the St. Patrick of the Irish, was Morgan's contemporary, but a younger man, born on the Clyde, near Dumbarton, in the year 372, and active during the former half of the fifth century. His work among the Gaelic Celts aided the efforts of the small communities of Celtic missionaries, called Culdees. St. David, who is remembered as the most famous teacher of the Welsh, was an austere and able priest of the school of the Egyptian monks, son of a Cymric prince, and by tradition uncle to King Arthur. He was at work during the former half of the sixth century. But the chief missionary work was then being done by the Culdees of the Irish Church. Columba, an Irish abbot of royal descent, after founding monasteries in the North of Ireland, passed in the year 563 to Scotland, and for the next thirty-four years laboured there as a missionary on the mainland and in the Hebrides, making his headquarters upon one of the Hebrides, the rocky island of Iona. Iona then became the most important of the Culdee missionary stations. It was not until Columba had been thus at work for three and thirty years that Pope Gregory I. sent the Italian Augustine into this country, where he acted as a missionary from Rome to the South of England, and became the first Archbishop of Canterbury. The Celtic missionaries had then been at work for generations among the English of the north. They had received their own teaching rather from the Eastern than from the Western Church, and followed, therefore, the practice of the Eastern Church in fixing the time for Easter, and in points of ceremonial wherein that Church differed from the Church of Rome. As the influence of teachers from Rome spread northward, hot conflict was raised between the teachers of the south and of the north upon these points of ceremonial. They appeared more vital questions to the Rome-bred clergy than to those trained in the schools of the Culdees, at Iona or at Lindisfarne. In the year 634 Oswald became king over the rude population of Deivyr and Bryneich, among whom there had been that early fusion of Celts with the incoming English settlers which is referred to by Aneurin in the Gododin (ch. i. § 7). King Oswald sent for missionaries to Iona. This was two years after the death of the Arabian prophet, Mahomet. The first of the teachers who came from Iona to the Northumbrians went back and made hopeless report of the people. [A.D. 657 Then Aidan volunteered for the work, and led a religious colony to Lindisfarne, which is at low water a peninsula, at high water an island, nine miles to the southward of our present Berwick-upon-Tweed. At Lindisfarne, where Oswald founded for him a bishopric, Aidan formed the great missionary station for Northumbria. He gave his goods to the poor, travelled on foot among the people whom he sought to bring to Christ, and won their hearts by simple truth and self-denying earnestness. More Culdees passed through Lindisfarne to join the work, and thus the place came to be known as Holy Isle. For the next thirty years the Celts were in all this region spiritual teachers of the English, and it was out of the midst of this great North of England movement, in the newly-established monastery of Whitby, that the English heart sang through the verse of Cædmon its first great hymn based on the Word of Truth. 4. The Whitby monastery was founded by the Abbess Hilda, in the year 657. She then moved to it from the religious house at Hartlepool, over which she had presided, and into which she had received, two years before, Elfleda, the one-year-old daughter of King Oswald's brother and successor. In thanksgiving for a victory, Elfleda's father had devoted the child to religious life. With a community of both sexes, bound less by formal ties than by a common wish to serve God and aid one another in His service while they diffused Christianity among the people, Hilda lived in the first simple abbey built on the high cliff at Whitby, maintained by a grant of surrounding lands. That which maintained her maintained also the poor about her. She had been taught by Aidan; had been for some years at Hartlepool much trusted, visited, and counselled by Aidan and other chief teachers of the Celtic Christians. Under her roof, in the year 664, when Whitby Abbey was but seven years old, there was held the Synod of Whitby, for settlement of the questions of ceremonial between the Celtic and the Roman Churches, and peace was secured by concession of the points upon which Rome insisted. At Whitby Hilda was as mother to the child-princess, who grew up under her care and became next abbess after her; was as mother in her little community, and among the rude people round about, who long preserved the belief that her form is at certain times to be seen in a vision of sunshine among the ruins of the later abbey built upon the site of hers. She so much encouraged the close study of Scripture that in her time many worthy servants of the Church and five TO A.D. 680.] CEDMON. 17 bishops are said to have come out of her abbey. Afflicted during the last six years of her life, she never failed in any duty; and her last words to her people were that they should preserve the peace of the Gospel among themselves and with all others. At the time of her death, in 680, Cuthbert, who died in 686, was Bishop of Lindisfarne. He also left the mark of a true Christian's life among the people, and was remembered as an angelic missionary priest, who had deep sympathy for the neglected poor. He would seek them in their most craggy and inaccessible homes, to dwell with them by the week or monththeir bishop and their brother. Such stir of human energies produced a poet worthy of the time. All that we know of him was told by Bede, who was also a north countryman, and who was born about the time when Cædmon's Paraphrase was written. 5. From Bede's account, without adopting its suggestion of miracle in the gift of song to the poet, we may infer that Cadmon was a tenant on some of the abbey lands at Whitby, and one of the converts who had a poet's nature stirred by Christian zeal. One day he joined a festive party at the house of some remoter neighbour of the country-side. The visitors came in on horseback and afoot, or in country cars, drawn some by horses and some by oxen. There was occasion for festivity that would last longer than a day. The draught cattle of the visitors were stabled, and would need watching of nights, since in wild times cattle-plunder also was a recreation, and one that joined business to pleasure. The visitors took turns by night in keeping watch over the stables. One evening when Cadmon sat with his companions over the ale-cup, and the song went round, his sense of song was keen, but, as a zealous Christian convert, he turned with repugnance from the battlestrains and heathen tales that were being chanted to the music of the rude harp which passed from hand to hand. As the harp came nearer to him he rose, since it was his turn that night to watch the cattle, and escaped into the stables. There, since we know by his work that he was true poet born, his train of thought doubtless continued till it led to a strong yearning for another form of song. If for these heathen hymns of war and rapine, knowledge and praise of God could be the glad theme of their household music, and if he, even he—perhaps we may accept as a true dream the vision which Bede next tells as a miracle. Cadmon watched, slept, and in his sleep one came to him and said, "Cædmon sing." He said, "I cannot. I came hither out of C the feast because I cannot sing." "But," answered the one who came to him, "you have to sing to me." "What," Cædmon asked, "ought I to sing?" And he answered, "Sing the origin of creatures." Having received which answer, Bede tells us, he began immediately to sing, in praise of God the Creator, verses of which this is the sense :-"Now we ought to praise the Author of the Heavenly Kingdom, the power of the Creator and His counsel, the deeds of the Father of Glory: how He, though the eternal God, became the Author of all marvels; Omnipotent Guardian, who created for the sons of men, first Heaven for their roof, and then the Earth." "This," adds Bede, "is the sense but not the order of the words which he sang when sleeping." Cædmon remembered upon waking the few lines he had made in his sleep, and continued to make others like them. The vision seems to have been simply the dream-form given to a continuation of his waking thoughts; and Cadmon may well have believed, according to the simple faith of his time, that in his dream he had received a command from heaven. He went in the morning to the steward of the land he held under the abbey, and proposed to use his gift of song in aid of the work that was being done by Abbess Hilda and her companions. Hilda called him to her, up the great rock, and, to test his power, caused pieces of Scripture story to be told to him, then bade him go home and turn them into verse. He returned next day with the work so well done that his teachers became in turn his hearers. Hilda then counselled him to give up his occupations as a layman, and received him with all his goods into the monastery. There sacred history was taught to him, that he might place the Word of God in pleasant song within their homes, and on their highways, and at festive gatherings, upon the lips of the surrounding people. He was himself taught by religious men trained in the Celtic school, which was more closely allied to the Eastern than the Western Church. They knew and read the Chaldee Scriptures, and as their new brother began his work with the song of Genesis, the name they gave him in the monastery was the Chaldee name of the book of Genesis, derived from its first words, "In the beginning," that being in the Chaldee b'Cadmon. 6. Cædmon sang, in what is now called his Paraphrase, of the Creation, and with it of the War in Heaven, of the fall of Satan, and of his counsellings in Hell as the Strong Angel of Presumption. Thus Cædmon began, first in time and among the first in genius, the strain of English poetry: TO A... So.] CÆDMONS PARAPHRASE. "Most right it is that we praise with our words, He speeds the strong, and is the Head of all None formed Him, no first was nor last shall be Is everlasting over thrones in heaven." 19 Cædmon paints "The Angel of Presumption," yet in heaven, questioning whether he would serve God: "Wherefore,' he said, 'shall I toil? No need have I of master. I can work With my own hands great marvels, and have power Stand by me, strong supporters, firm in strife. I am their master, and may rule this realm. And thus, to quote one passage more, Cadmon, a thousand years before the time of Milton, sang of Satan fallen: "Satan discoursed, he who henceforth ruled hell Spake sorrowing. God's Angel erst, he had shone white in heaven, Then said he, Most unlike this narrow place To that which once we knew, high in heaven's realm, Which my Lord gave me, though therein no more For the Almighty we hold royalties. Yet right hath He not done in striking us Down to the fiery bottom of hot hell, Banished from heaven's kingdom, with decree That He will set in it the race of man. Worst of my sorrows this, that, wrought of earth, Adam shall sit in bliss on my strong throne; Whilst we these pangs endure, this grief in hell. And for a season, for one winter's space, Might be without; then with this host, I But iron binds me round; this coil of chains Rides me; I rule no more-close bonds of hell |