served. But as you have come so far to communicate to us what you believe to be true, and the most excellent, we will not molest you. We will receive you hospitably, and supply you with what you need; nor do we forbid any one to join your society whom you can persuade to prefer it." He gave them a mansion at Canterbury, his metropolis, for their residence; and allowed them to preach as they pleased.

Thus sanctioned, they entered on the labours of their mission, which were crowned with such success, that in a very short time the king and great multitudes of his subjects were converted; of whom Augustin is said to have baptized ten thousand on Christmas-day.*

Gregory received the news of Augustin's success in England with great joy; and, resolving to neglect nothing in his power to · render it still greater, and carry it to perfection, he despatched several others from Rome to assist the missionaries in propagating the knowledge of the gospel among our countrymen. He wrote to the newly baptized monarch, and his queen, Birtha-furnished Augustin with certain prudential regulations for the government of the Church of England, of which he was now consecrated archbishop; hoping that this new dignity would give additional influence to his doctrines! One of the advices which Gregory gave to Augustin was, not to destroy the heathen temples of the AngloSaxons, but only to remove the images of their gods, to wash the walls with holy-water, to erect altars, and deposit relics in them, and so convert them into Christian churches: and this, not only to save the expense of building new ones, but that the people might be more easily prevailed upon to frequent those places of worship to which they had been accustomed. He directs him further to accommodate the ceremonies of the Christian worship, as much as possible, to those of the heathen, that the people might not be much startled at the change; and, in particular, he advises him to allow the Christian converts, on certain festivals, to kill and eat a great number of oxen to the glory of God, as they had formerly done to the honour of the devil.+ These admonitions, which were but too well observed, introduced the grossest corruptions into the Christian worship, which in fact had become * Bede, lib. i. cap. 25. Gervas. Act. Pontif. Cant.

† Bede, lib. i. ch. 30.

INCREASE OF MONASTERIES.

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abominably corrupt under the old reginé; but it serves to shew how much the professed followers of the apostles had, in the sixth and seventh centuries, departed from the simplicity and sincerity of those of the first.

Augustin died about the year 604, at which time the profession of Christianity, or, more properly speaking, the conversion of the Saxons, had not extended beyond the little kingdom of Kent; but in the course of the seventh century, it found its way into the kingdom of Essex, which comprehended the counties of Essex and Middlesex; into Northumberland; into Wessex, or among the West Saxons; also into the kingdom of Mercia, which comprehended the middle parts of England; and lastly into Sussex. In all these places, bishoprics and the subordinate chain of ecclesiastics were established, and provision made for the clergy, among whom we may be sure that there was no lack of contention and scrambling after the loaves and fishes. But these are things on which we cannot dwell; for my circumscribed limits only allow me to give you an outline of the subject.

In the year 690, and in the 89th of his age, died Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, which see he had filled for three-andtwenty years. He is described as one of the greatest men that ever filled the chair of Canterbury-great, I presume, as an ecclesiastical politician. By his influence, all the English churches were united, and brought to a perfect uniformity of discipline and worship; not, indeed, upon the model of the apostolic churches, but upon one that much better suited the kingdom of the clergy! Such bishoprics as were large were divided, and many new ones founded; great men were encouraged to build parish churches, by declaring them and their successors patrons of those churches; and a regular provision was made for the clergy, by the imposition of a certain tax, or kirk-shot, upon every village; from which the most obscure ones were not exempted.*

In the course of the seventh century, monasteries, in great abundance, were founded in all parts of England, and rich endowments bequeathed them. To encourage persons to adopt the monastic life, the impious doctrine now began to be broached, that "as soon

as any person put on the habit of a monk, all the sins of his former life were forgiven him." This engaged many princes and great men, who generally have as many sins as their inferiors, to put on the cowl, and end their days in monasteries. In fact, superstition, in various forms, made rapid strides in England in the seventh century; among which may be mentioned, a ridiculous veneration for relics, in which the clergy of the church of Rome had for some time been driving a gainful trade-a traffic which never can be carried on except between knaves and fools. Few persons, in those days, thought themselves safe from the machinations of the devil, unless they carried the relics of some saint about them; and no church could be dedicated without a decent quantity of this sacred trumpery. Stories of dreams, visions, and miracles, were propagated by the clergy, without a blush, and believed without a doubt by the laity. Extraordinary watchings, fastings, and other arts of tormenting the body, in order to save the soul, became frequent and fashionable; and it began to be believed that a journey to Rome was the most direct road to heaven.*

This last mentioned piece of superstition, namely, that of making a pilgrimage to Rome, began towards the end of the seventh century, and was carried to perfection in the eighth. The Roman missionaries, and the ecclesiastics whom they educated, contrived to raise so strong a feeling of enthusiasm in several of the AngloSaxon sovereigns whom they had converted, as to lead them to renounce the world. It was not only the widowed Queen of Edwin who gave the first precedent of an Anglo-Saxon lady of that rank taking the veil, nor Oswy devoting his daughter Elfler to a convent, who exhibited this religious zeal; but several of the sovereigns themselves, from the same impulse, abandoned their thrones, in order to make pilgrimages to Rome. Thus, in 688, Ceadwalla travelled to Rome, on a pilgrimage of piety, where he was baptized by the pope, and died in the following week, at the age of thirty. Some years afterwards, in 709, two other AngloSaxon kings-Conrad, of Mercia, and Offa, of Essex-quitted that exalted station which so many covet, went to Rome, and became monks there. And thus, also, at no long interval, a greater sove

Theod. Capit. Labb. Concil.; Bede, Epist. ad Egberet.; Spelman, Concil. tom. i. p. 99. Bede, passim.

PILGRIMAGES TO ROME.

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reign than either, viz. Ina, of Wessex, obeyed the same impulse, took the same journey, and found his grave in the same venerated city. Offa is described as a most amiable youth, who was induced to abdicate his power from the purest motives of devotion; and we cannot wonder that the examples of those kings should produce a thousand imitations.

Nor was this foolish and fanatical practice of making pilgrimages to Rome restricted to the men, as the following fact may shew:-In the year 740, Cuthbert, bishop of Hereford, was made Archbishop of Canterbury. An intimate friendship had long subsisted between him and his countryman, Winfrid, who had assumed the name of Boniface, and was, by favour of the pope, become Archbishop of Mentz. As soon as Boniface received the news of the advancement of his friend to the primacy of England, he wrote him a very long letter, in which he points out several things in the state of the church of England which required reformation, particularly the gaudy dress and intemperate lives of the clergy. He exhorts him also to put a stop to the nuns, and other good ladies of England, leaving their country, and going on pilgrimages to Rome; assigning as a reason, that they were generally debauched before they returned, and many of them became common prostitutes in the cities of France and Italy.* To remedy these and other evils, he advises Cuthbert to call a council, which the latter did in the year 747, at a place called Cloveshoes, or Clyff, in Kent. Edelbald, king of Mercia, with all the great men of his court; Cuthbert, archbishop of Canterbury, with eleven bishops of his province, together with many abbots, abbesses, and other clergy, were present at this council, in which no fewer than thirty canons were made for the reformation of the lives of the clergy of all ranks, and the regulation of all the affairs of the English church. Much valuable advice was given to the bishops, clergy, and people in the canons of this council; but, alas! to what did it all tend? An attempt to reform such a constitution of things by human enactments and sage council, was little better than an effort to wash the Ethiopian white, or change the leopard's spots! From one of the canons of this council we learn that the public prayers and songs

* Spelm. Concil. tom i. p. 237.

of the church were even then performed in Latin, which the common people did not understand. But a curious salvo for the absurd practice of praying in an unknown tongue was propounded -the people were allowed to fix any meaning to the words they pleased in their own minds, and to pray in their hearts for any thing they wanted, no matter how foreign to the real sense of the public prayers.* This canon also contains the following short prayer for the dead :-"Lord! according to the greatness of thy mercy, grant rest to his soul; and of thy infinite pity, vouchsafe to him the joys of eternal light with thy saints."

Before the end of the eighth century, a synod was convened in the kingdom of Mercia, at a place called Calcuith, whence the regulations are commonly called "the Canons of the council of Calcuith." These canons, which are twenty in number, I now advert to, on account of their containing a kind of system of the ecclesiastical politics of those times, in which we may discern the clergy beginning to advance several new claims, such as a divine right to the tenth of all the possessions of the laity, and an exemption from being tried and punished by the civil magistrates. To support this last claim, several texts of scripture are most shamefully perverted. The pope had sent his legates into England to visit the several churches at this time, and the latter took occasion to point out several things which they disapproved, and which therefore were prohibited in these canons, such as the priests celebrating mass without shoes or stockings, and with chalices made of horn; the bishops sitting on the same bench with the aldermen, and judging in civil and criminal causes; and the people still retaining many Pagan practices, such as sorcery, divination, and so forth. But, to draw this Lecture to a close, ignorance and superstition advanced with gigantic strides in England, as well as in Italy, in the course of the eighth century. The clergy became more knavish and rapacious, and the laity more abject and stupid than at any former period. Of this, the trade in relics alone affords abundant proof. The monks were daily making discoveries, as they pretended, of the precious remains of some departed saint, which they soon converted into gold and silver. In this traffic they had all the opportunities they could desire of imposing

Spelman, Concil. tom. i. p. 246. † Spelman, Concil. Idem. Canon 11, 17, 10, 3.