[108] Sicut a contra Brittones, inveterati et claudicantes a semitis suis, et capita ferre sine corona prætendunt. (Beda, lib. v, cap. xxiii.) Even as, on the contrary, the Britons, inveterate and halting in their paths, expose their heads without a crown.
Clement--Struggle between a Scotchman and an Englishman--Word of God only--Clement's Success--His condemnation--Virgil and the Antipodes--John Scotus and Philosophical Religion--Alfred and the Bible--Darkness and Popery--William the Conqueror--Wulston at Edward's Tomb--Struggle between William and Hildebrand--The Pope yields--Cæsaropapia.
The independent Christians of Scotland, who subordinated the authority of man to that of God, were filled with sorrow as they beheld these back-slidings: and it was this no doubt which induced many to leave their homes and fight in the very heart of Europe in behalf of that Christian liberty which had just expired among themselves.
At the commencement of the eighth century a great idea took possession of a pious doctor of the Scottish church named Clement.[109] The _work of God_ is the very essence of Christianity, thought he, and this work must be defended against all the encroachments of man. To human traditionalism he opposed the sole authority of the word of God; to clerical materialism, a church which is the assembly of the saints; and to Pelagianism, the sovereignty of grace. He was a man of decided character and firm faith, but without fanaticism; his heart was open to the holiest emotions of our nature; he was a husband and a father. He quitted Scotland and travelled among the Franks, every where scattering the seeds of the faith. It happened unfortunately that a man of kindred energy, Winifrid or Boniface of Wessex, was planting the pontifical Christianity in the same regions. This great missionary, who possessed in an essential degree the faculty of organization, aimed at external unity above all things, and when he had taken the oath of fidelity to Gregory II., he had received from that pope a collection of the Roman laws. Boniface, henceforth a docile disciple or rather a fanatical champion of Rome, supported on the one hand by the pontiff, and on the other by Charles Martel, had preached to the people of Germany, among some undoubted Christian truths,--the doctrine of tithes and of papal supremacy. The Englishman and the Scotchman, representatives of two great systems, were about to engage in deadly combat in the heart of Europe--in a combat whose consequences might be incalculable.