You see there are letters round this golden Lion of Alfred’s spelling-book, which his princess friend was likely enough to spell for him.  They are two Latin hexameters:—­

  Hic Leo, surgendo, portas confregit Averni
  Qui nunquam dormit, nusquam dormitat, in aevum. 
  (This Lion, rising, burst the gates of Death: 
  This, who sleeps not, nor shall sleep, for ever.)

Now here is the Christian change of the Heraclean conquest of Death into Christ’s Resurrection.  Samson’s bearing away the gates of Gaza is another like symbol, and to the mind of Alfred, taught, whether by the Pope Leo for his schoolmaster, or by the great-granddaughter of Charlemagne for his schoolmistress, it represented, as it did to all the intelligence of Christendom, Christ in His own first and last, Alpha and Omega, description of Himself,—­

“I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore, and have the keys of Hell and of Death.”  And in His servant St. John’s description of Him—­

“Who is the Faithful Witness and the First-begotten of the dead, and the Prince of the kings of the earth.”

All this assuredly, so far as the young child, consecrated like David, the youngest of his brethren, conceived his own new life in Earth and Heaven,—­he understood already in the Lion symbol.  But of all this I had no thought[31] when I chose the prayer of Alfred as the type of the Religion of his era, in its dwelling, not on the deliverance from the punishment of sin, but from the poisonous sleep and death of it.  Will you ever learn that prayer again,—­youths who are to be priests, and knights, and kings of England, in these the latter days? when the gospel of Eternal Death is preached here in Oxford to you for the Pride of Truth? and “the mountain of the Lord’s House” has become a Golgotha, and the “new song before the throne” sunk into the rolling thunder of the death rattle of the Nations, crying, “O Christ, where is Thy Victory!”

[Footnote 31:  The reference to the Bible of Charles le Chauve was added to my second lecture (page 54), in correcting the press, mistakenly put into the text instead of the notes.]

NOTES.

1. The Five Christmas Days. (These were drawn out on a large and conspicuous diagram.)

These days, as it happens, sum up the History of their Five Centuries.

Christmas Day, 496.  Clovis baptized.
"      "   800.  Charlemagne crowned.
"      "  1041.  Vow of the Count of Aversa (Page 80).
"      "  1066.  The Conqueror crowned.
"      "  1130.  Roger II. crowned King of the Two Sicilies.

2.  For conclusion of the whole matter two pictures were shown and commented on—­the two most perfect pictures in the world.

(1) A small piece from Tintoret’s Paradiso in the Ducal Palace, representing the group of St. Ambrose, St. Jerome, St. Gregory, St. Augustine, and behind St. Augustine his mother watching him, her chief joy even in Paradise.