schismatic; and the vigour of his comrade Wilfrid stirred so hot a strife that Oswiu was prevailed upon to summon in 664 a great council at Whitby, where the future ecclesiastical allegiance of his realm should be decided.  The points actually contested were trivial enough.  Colman, Aidan’s successor at Holy Island, pleaded for the Irish fashion of the tonsure, and for the Irish time of keeping Easter:  Wilfrid pleaded for the Roman.  The one disputant appealed to the authority of Columba, the other to that of St. Peter.  “You own,” cried the king at last to Colman, “that Christ gave to Peter the keys of the kingdom of heaven—­has He given such power to Columba?” The bishop could but answer “No.”  “Then will I rather obey the porter of heaven,” said Oswiu, “lest when I reach its gates he who has the keys in his keeping turn his back on me, and there be none to open.”  The humorous tone of Oswiu’s decision could not hide its importance, and the synod had no sooner broken up than Colman, followed by the whole of the Irish-born brethren and thirty of their English fellows, forsook the see of St. Aidan and sailed away to Iona.  Trivial in fact as were the actual points of difference which severed the Roman Church from the Irish, the question to which communion Northumbria should belong was of immense moment to the after fortunes of England.  Had the Church of Aidan finally won, the later ecclesiastical history of England would probably have resembled that of Ireland.  Devoid of that power of organization which was the strength of the Roman Church, the Celtic Church in its own Irish home took the clan system of the country as the basis of its government.  Tribal quarrels and ecclesiastical controversies became inextricably confounded; and the clergy, robbed of all really spiritual influence, contributed no element save that of disorder to the state.  Hundreds of wandering bishops, a vast religious authority wielded by hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of piety from morality, the absence of those larger and more humanizing influences which contact with a wider world alone can give, this is a picture which the Irish Church of later times presents to us.  It was from such a chaos as this that England was saved by the victory of Rome in the Synod of Whitby.  But the success of Wilfrid dispelled a yet greater danger.  Had England clung to the Irish Church it must have remained spiritually isolated from the bulk of the Western world.  Fallen as Rome might be from its older greatness, it preserved the traditions of civilization, of letters and art and law.  Its faith still served as a bond which held together the nations that sprang from the wreck of the Empire.  To fight against Rome was, as Wilfrid said, “to fight against the world.”  To repulse Rome was to condemn England to isolation.  Dimly as such thoughts may have presented themselves to Oswiu’s mind, it was the instinct of a statesman that led him to set aside the love and gratitude of his youth and to link England to Rome in the Synod of Whitby.