Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/145

ST. AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY 95 Amer. Edition) : " The effect of Christianity on Anglo-Saxon England was at once to re-establish a connection both between the remoter parts of the island with each other, and of England with the rest of the Christian world. They ceased to dwell apart, a race of warlike, unapproachable barbarians, in constant warfare with the bordering tribes, or occupied in their own petty feuds or in- roads ; rarely, as in the case of Ethelbert, connected by intermarriage with some neighboring Teutonic state. Though the Britons were still secluded in the moun- tains, or at extremities of the land, by animosities which even Christianity could not allay, yet the Picts and Scots, and the parts of Ireland which were occupied by Chrismn monasteries, were now brought into peaceful communication, first with the kingdom of Northumbria, and through Northumbria with the rest of England. The intercourse with Europe was of far higher importance, and tended much more rapidly to introduce the arts and habits of civilization into the land. There was a constant flow of missionaries across the British Channel, who possessed all the knowledge which still remained in Europe. All the earlier metropolitans of Canterbury and the bishops of most of the southern sees, were foreigners ; they were commissioned at Rome, if not consecrated there ; they travelled backward and forward in person, or were in constant communication with that great city, in which were found all the culture, the letters, the arts, and sciences which had survived the general wreck." Nobody need disparage the Celtic Church ; but it is not too much to say that the Celtic Church could never have preserved Christianity in Britain against the victorious Saxon or English heathen. But from the very beginning the Church of England has retained the traces of her early origin, when Gregory the Great was Pope, when the claim to be universal bishop was deemed untenable, when even the ritual of the Mass was still in unessential details flexible. MAHOMET (571-632) HE Arabian "Prophet" was born at the city of Mecca, some time during the sixth century, but the precise year has, after much dis- cussion, still been left in doubt. Hottinger says, A.D. 571, Reiske, A.D. 572, and Gagnier, A.D. 578. His lineage has also been the . subject of great altercation, one party exalting him above most of his countrymen, while the other degraded him to the lowest rank particularly contemporary Christian writers, who were desirous of rendering him an object of contempt ; and in the same degree that the Christians felt themselves called upon to degrade the Arabian prophet, so did the Mahometans think themselves compelled to exalt him. Mahomet successfully vindicated for himself a high