[41] Subjectos vestros. (Opp. Gregorii, tom. iv. p 334.) Your subjects.
[42] Prona in bonis operibus . . . in omnipotentis Dei timore. (Ibid. tom. ii. p. 835.) Disposed to good works . . . in the fear of God omnipotent.
[43] We find the same idea in Wiseman, Lect. ix, On the principal doctrines and practices of the Catholic church. London, 1836.
Success of that kind which popery desires soon crowned the labours of its servants. The forty-one missionaries having landed in the isle of Thanet, in the year 597, the king of Kent consented to receive them, but in the open air, for fear of magic. They drew up in such a manner as to produce an effect on the rude islanders. The procession was opened by a monk bearing a huge cross on which the figure of Christ was represented: his colleagues followed chanting their Latin hymns, and thus they approached the oak appointed for the place of conference. They inspired sufficient confidence in Ethelbert to gain permission to celebrate their worship in an old ruinous chapel at Durovern (Canterbury), where British Christians had in former times adored the Saviour Christ. The king and thousands of his subjects received not long after, with certain forms, and certain Christian doctrines, the errors of the Roman pontiffs--as purgatory, for instance, which Gregory was advocating with the aid of the most absurd fables.[44] Augustine baptized ten thousand pagans in one day. As yet Rome had only set her foot in Great Britain, she did not fail erelong to establish her kingdom there.
[44] Hoepfner, De origine dogmatis de purgatorio. Halle, 1792.
We should be unwilling to undervalue the religious element now placed before the Anglo-Saxons, and we can readily believe that many of the missionaries sent from Italy desired to work a Christian work. We think, too, that the Middle Ages ought to be appreciated with more equitable sentiments than have always been found in the persons who have written on that period. Man's conscience lived, spoke, and groaned during the long dominion of popery; and like a plant growing among thorns, it often succeeded in forcing a passage through the obstacles of traditionalism and hierarchy, to blossom in the quickening sun of God's grace. The Christian element is even strongly marked in some of the most eminent men of theocracy--in Anselm for instance.