Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/144

,,, STATESMEN AND SAGES Augustine left them, not without a solemn warning : " If they would not have peace with their brethren, they would have to accept war from their enemies ; if they would not preach the way of life to the nation of the Angli, they would have to suffer at their hands the vengeance of death." It is scarcely credible though in religious controversy almost anything is credible that a warning so obviously wise, and even charitable, should have been interpreted as a mere threat, and as evidence that Augustine himself was the author of the calamities that afterward befell the Celtic Church. Such is the simple story of the mission and the life for we read nothing about his life but his mission of Augustine, the first archbishop of Canterbury. He was not able to carry out the whole scheme of Gregory. He was not the first to introduce Christianity into Britain. But, apart from Queen Bertha's private chaplain, he was the first to introduce Christianity to the English those Teutonic tribes which were the ancestors of the English of to-day. Who first brought the gospel to the Roman province of Britain no one knows ; nor is it ot the slightest importance that anyone should know. But that there should have been two Christian religions in England when the nation was being consolidated, would have been fatal both to nation and church. We conclude this brief notice by a passage from two historians, neither of whom could possibly be sus- pected of any undue subservience to the modern Church of Rome. The first is from Mr. Green's "The Making of England" (pp. 314, 315) ; he is speaking of the results of the Synod of Whitby (A.D. 664). " It is possible that lesser political motives may have partly swayed Oswin in his decision, for the revival of Mercia had left him but the alliance of Kent in the south, and this victory of the Kentish Church would draw tighter the bonds which linked together the two powers. But we may fairly credit him with a larger statesmanship. Trivial in fact as were the actual points of difference which parted the Roman Church from the Irish, the question to which commun- ion Northumbria should belong was, as we have seen, of immense moment to the after-fortunes of England. It was not merely that, as Wilfrid said, to fight against Rome was to fight against the world. Had England, indeed, clung to the Irish Church, it must have remained spiritually isolated from the bulk of Western Christendom. 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 repulse Rome was to condemn England to isolation. But grave as such considerations were, they were of little weight beside the influence which Oswin's decision had on the very unity of the English race. The issue of the Synod not only gave England a share in the religious unity of Western Christendom ; it gave her a religious unity at home. However dimly such thoughts may have presented themselves to Oswin's mind, it was the instinct of a statesman that led him to set aside the love and gratitude of his youth, and to secure the religious oneness of England in the Synod of Whitby." The other is from Milman's "History of Latin Christianity" (ii., 198, 199,