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Home The Coming of Christianity The Coming of Christianity; Part 2 |
The Coming of Christianity; Part 2Augustine and his followers were monks; they belonged to the order founded in the fifth century by St. Benedict of Nursia. Benedict, while wishing that his monks should set an example of holy lives, did not mean them to be idle. Laborare est orare, "to work is to pray", was his maxim for his followers' guidance. Consequently, though Augustine was come to teach the Saxon warriors that there was more serious business in life than fighting and feasting and drinking, they did not incur the contempt which they would have done had the Saxons found them what they would have considered idlers, persons who gave up their whole lives to meditation and prayer. And so, though Ethelbert received them with caution - "Your words", he said, "are fair, but they are new, and I cannot yet forsake what I have so long followed " - yet he gave them leave to preach and gain as many as they could to their religion. The earnest and simple teaching of the monks soon won converts, and amongst them Ethelbert himself. The king bestowed on Augustine a ruined church at Canterbury. Augustine named it "Christ Church"; it thus became, as it has remained, the first church in England - first both in time and in importance. On that site stands now the Cathedral of Canterbury; its Archbishop is the head of the Church of England.Just as a marriage brought Kent to Christianity, so another marriage carried the faith northward. Ethelbert's daughter, Ethelburga, married Edwin, the powerful King of Northumbria. As the princess was a Christian, it was agreed that she should be free to keep her faith. And with her went a new missionary, Paulinus. We are told of Edwin that he "commanded all the nations of the English as well as of the Britons save only Kent". He was worth winning as a convert, and Paulinus set to work to win him; his wife besought him; even the far-distant Pope wrote him letters and sent presents. Edwin was moved by their pleading and by what he thought to be the special favours of Heaven which came to him at this time: he escaped from a treacherous attempt to murder him, he won a great victory over the West Saxons, his wife bore him a daughter. He consulted his Witan as to whether they should accept the new faith. One of his councillors spoke to the king a parable, in which he likened the life of man to the swift flight of a sparrow, "flying in at one door and straightway out at another; whilst he is within he is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space, he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he had come. So this life of man appears for a short space; but of what went before, or of what is to follow, we are ignorant. If therefore this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed". Paulinus was called in to address the Council, and at once persuaded them to become Christians. Coifi, the heathen high priest, was the first to destroy the old idols. Edwin's subjects followed their king's example, and were baptized in thousands. |
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