of exquisite form, studded with rough gems and inlaid with enamel, bronze boar-crests on the helmets of the warriors, shields decorated with ornamental designs, show a high grade of industrial art. Kings and chiefs are spoken of as "bracelet-givers." The sword was fashioned with especial skill, as the warrior's supreme reliance; coats of "ring-mail," made of steel rings deftly interwoven, were common, and "rattled upon the warriors as they walked." The smith was held in high honor, and Weland, the celestial armorer, held a place among their gods. As for architecture, they had practically none worthy of the name, their few buildings of stone being of the rudest construction; for the most part the plain wooden building met all their desires and needs. Their pottery, too, was rude and inferior. Some knowledge of agriculture they evidently brought with them, and they speedily became proficient in the cultivation of the soil. Each portion of Britain mastered by hard fighting became the country of the conquerors. They had not come merely to plunder, and then to sail away to their old bleak and barren lands. They had come as home-seekers, sword in hand. They did not desire to share the land with the Britons. They wanted it all, and they wanted it for a civilization of their own. That unbendable, non-compliant, infusible something which it is now common to call the "insularity" of Englishmen is a quality which their ancestors seem to have brought with them across the North Sea. This appears with comic touch in the name they soon gave to the earlier inhabitants of the land. No sooner were they themselves established in possession than they regarded themselves as the real people, and they called the native Britons "Welisc," "foreigners"-whence the name still applied to the Welsh of our own day. The country the Britons still retained became "the foreigners' land"-North Wales and West Wales. Their conquest was more than an invasion; it was rather an armed migration. In place of the Roman city, which they destroyed, they set up the Germanic town, which they knew how to build, to inhabit, and to defend. Once established in their conquests, the conquerors fought many a fierce battle with one another-not for dispossession but for supremacy, the "overlordship" of one king or kingdom over one or more of the others. Strangely enough, these tribal wars opened the way for Christianity. In their contests against one another, the Engles and the Saxons did not wage exterminating war such as they had carried on against the Britons. The captives, instead of being slain, were sold into slavery, and by this means English slaves appeared in many markets of Europe. Very thrilling is the story of how the white skin, fair hair, and blue eyes of some of these Anglian captives, exposed for sale in Rome, attracted the attention of a young deacon, who called them “not Angles, but angels,” and who, when he became pope, to be known in history as Gregory the Great, undertook to Christianize the people whose captives had so impressed him at an earlier day. Thrilling also the story how Augustine and his band of missionaries landed in 597 on the Isle of Thanet, where the original force of Jutes had landed in 449, almost a century and a half before; how Ethelbert, King of Kent, who had now obtained the overlordship of England, held his court in the open air, listened attentively to the stranger's discourse, and within a year accepted the Christian faith and was baptized, his adhesion securing that of the nobles and the leaders of the people, until gradually Christianity spread northward through his dominions. It was taken for granted that the religion of the realm should be determined by the king, and this principle long subsisted in English history. It is true that missionaries from Scotland and Ireland had already done much, and afterwards did much, to win Anglo-Saxons to the Christian faith; but the general acceptance of Christianity throughout the realm is to be traced to the mission of Augustine. Christianity proved a marvelous gift. All theology apart, it opened to the Anglo-Saxon islanders the continent of Europe and all the centuries of the past. It gave them the thrilling narratives of the Old Testament and the sweet and tender story and maxims of the Gospels. It brought to them the eloquence of Cicero, and the poetry of Vergil, and, through the Latin, all that the world then knew of Homer, Aristotle, and Plato, and of all the great poets and historians and sages of Greece. It brought unity of thought, and, in time, of organization. Across the frontiers of the warring kingdoms that divided England reached one thought and one religion that looked to one supreme God, to whom all men and all nations were alike responsible. In place of the blind Wyrd, "Fate," it gave the Will of an almighty, all-wise, and merciful Father whose ordaining was indeed irresistible for every nation and every life, but was according to a divine plan and purpose of good to all true souls in this life and in the life beyond. Even by the penances of the church these rude barbarians were taught the consciousness of sin. Murder and robbery and other crimes were no longer mere disorders that could be atoned for by a pecuniary fine, but reached within the jurisdiction of the Great Dispenser, who held the evil-doer responsible beyond all human censure or penalty. Such result appears strikingly in the poems of the great Northumbrian poet, Cynewulf. In his youth a gay, roistering minstrel at the courts of the nobles, he came, as he himself thrillingly tells, under a "conviction of sin," and, after long oppression of conscience, to a sense of divine forgiveness and love, all of which is as thrillingly depicted as in any experience ever related in a Methodist camp-meeting. Christianity brought an outlook beyond the present life. Seamen or warriors would meet danger or death with the same steadfast courage as of old, but they no longer came to a blank cessation of being. Thus in the poem called "The Battle of Maldon," the hero, who has grandly led his host against the invading Vikings, after valiant exploits has his right arm disabled so that the sword falls to the ground, and never thinking of flight, he awaits sure death at the hands of his onrushing foes. Then he utters his last appeal to the divine power: "To thee I offer thanks, O Ruler of the peoples, For all the delightfulness I've found upon the earth. Christianity brought to England two centuries of Latin learning. Whatever we may now think of the monastic life, in that day the monasteries were the sole homes and centers of learning. The monk alone, by virtue of his religious consecration, was exempt from the call to bear arms. He alone could have the quiet and peace that made study possible. The monks still held the primitive idea of physical labor joined with spiritual devotion. They drained marshes, reclaimed fens, and cultivated the fields around their monasteries. Then in many quiet |