ghosts.  Fourth, a deification of certain abstract ideas, such as War, Fate, Victory, and Death.  But the average heathen Anglo-Saxon religion was merely a vast mass of superstition, a dark and gloomy terrorism, begotten of the vague dread of misfortune which barbarians naturally feel in a half-peopled land, where war and massacre are the highest business of every man’s lifetime, and a violent death the ordinary way in which he meets his end.

CHAPTER IX.

THE CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH.

It was impossible that a country lying within sight of the orthodox Frankish kingdom, and enclosed between two Christian Churches on either side, should long remain in such a state of isolated heathendom.  For to be cut off from Christendom was to be cut off from the whole social, political, intellectual, and commercial life of the civilised world.  In Britain, as distinctly as in the Pacific Islands in our own day, the missionary was the pioneer of civilisation.  The change which Christianity wrought in England in a few generations was almost as enormous as the change which it has wrought in Hawaii at the present time.  Before the arrival of the missionary, there was no written literature, no industrial arts, no peace, no social intercourse between district and district.  The church came as a teacher and civiliser, and in a few years the barbarous heathen English warrior had settled down into a toilsome agriculturist, an eager scholar, a peaceful law-giver, or an earnest priest.  The change was not merely a change of religion, it was a revolution from a life of barbarism to a life of incipient culture, and slow but progressive civilisation.

So inevitable was the Christianisation of England, that even while the flood of paganism was pouring westward, the east was beginning to receive the faith of Rome from the Frankish kingdom and from Italy.  It has been necessary, indeed, to anticipate a little, in order to show the story of the conquest in its true light.  Ten years before the heathen AEthelfrith of Northumbria massacred the Welsh monks at Chester, Augustine had brought Christianity to the people of Kent.

In 596, Gregory the Great determined to send a mission to England.  Even before that time, Kent had been in closer union with the Continent than any other part of the country.  Trade went on with the kindred Saxon coast of the Frankish kingdom, and AEthelberht, the ambitious Kentish king, and over-lord of all England south of the Humber, had even married Bercta, a daughter of the Frankish king of Paris.  Bercta was of course a Christian, and she brought her own Frankish chaplain, who officiated in the old Roman church of St. Martin, at Canterbury.  But Gregory’s mission was on a far larger scale.  Augustine, prior of the monastery on the Coelian Hill, was sent with forty monks to convert the heathen English.  They landed in Thanet, in 597, with all the pomp of Roman civilisation