9. The Saxons continued, for sonic time after their settlement in Britain, both pagans and idolaters, and many of their pagan superstitions continued to be blen ded with their early Christianity. The present names of our .days in the week, attest the names of some of the deities whom they worshipped ; and the periods of Jule and Esther,* though long afterwards religious terms in our own church, still bear the Saxon appella tion. It would be an endless and useless task to enter on a long detail of the fanciful beings who filled the pa gan calendar of this people, or the no less fanciful re veries of antiquaries, who have delighted in distinguish ing one barbarous deity from another. Their princip it deity was Woden, who is generally placed in the third century ; and from him the genealogy of almost all their gods and heroes seems to be deduced. The Angles, we know from Tacitus, had a benign deity, whom they worshipped under the appellation of Bertha ; probably as the symbolical power of the earth. They dreaded an evil being whom they called Faul. They fancied a fe male existence which they called Elf ; and must have believed her to be handsome, as they complimented their ladies on resembling her. This lady seems to have been the mother of a numerous brood of the same light bodieo personage s, the fairy. elves, who makes so respec table a figure in the later regions of Gothic poetry and romance. The Saxons, who conquered England, were, like all the tribes of that race, remarkably superstitious ; they consulted the voices and flights of birds as the in terpreters of the divine will ; and on certain occasions believed their horses to neigh from divine inspiration. As it is the practice of all nations to describe their gods as similar as possible to themselves, we cannot wonder at their sacrificing human beings to those imagined powers, whose, dispositions they judged to be as fierce as their own : so that after Christianity and civilization had taken root, under the Roman government of Britain, it was again displaced by temples and priests, probably as dreadful in their mysteries as the Druids and groves of Mona. Christianity, however, began to regain its influence in the sixth century, under the protection of Ethelbert, king of Kent, who, in 570, had married Bertha, daughter of a French monarch, Charobet. Pope Gregory, (afterwards the saint) seeing some beautiful English youths exposed as slaves at Rome, thought the will of God communicated to him in a pun 'which their name suggestecht and appointed a monk, named Augus tine, to go and preach Christianity in England. Augus tine and his missionaries landed in Thanet ; and it was auspicious for their undertaking, that the queen of Kent, already mentioned, was a Christian. By the aid of the Frankish interpreters, a communication with Ethelbert was opened, who received the missionary in the open air, to prevent the operation of witchcraft. Ile had the candour and good sense, however, to tell them, that interesting as the promises of their religion appeared, he could not forsake the established custom of his an cestors ; yet, since they came from a far country, to impart what they believed to be a blessing, they should be welcome to his hospitality, and suffered to persuade as many as chose to believe them, to join their religion. The monks commenced their preaching, their absti nence, and devotions, in Canterbury; and soon convert ed this candid sovereign, as well as thousands of his subjects, to the new faith. By degrees Christianity spread over all the kingdoms of the heptarchy, and took root over the whole island, though its progress was often arrested by the relapse of sonic of the Saxon kings to paganism, by foreign invasions, and domestic broils ; and too frequently retarded by the greedy attempts of the English uishops to subjugate the churches of the north and of Wales, where Christianity had conic from a different quarter, to the power of the metropolitan of England. The nephew of Ethelbert introduced Chris tianity into Essex; and soon after his conversion, built the church of St Pauls, in London, which was at that time the capital of his kingdom.
The adoption of Christianity in the dominions of this prince was marked by an interesting circumstance, the convocation of all the great men of the nation, in a wit tenagemot, to deliberate on its merits. Coifi, the arch priest of the old pagan religion, avowed himself a con vert. Like a true priest, he declared that there was no utility in praying to gods who would not help forward their votaries in this world ; I myself," said Coifi, " have been studious in worshipping the old idols of our fathers more than any one in the kingdom, and yet, many persons have enjoyed much more of the royal gifts and honours, and shared more abundantly of all worldly advantages than myself. f—Let us leave those gods who are so blind to the merit of their best worship pers." An older man rose next to speak : " Our pre sent life," said he, " Oh king, reminds me of a bird that flies in from the darkness and cold to shelter itself un der our roof, at some feast where your majesty and your nobles are sitting at a convivial banquet, with the hearth blazing in the middle of the hall ; the little stranger comes in at one door, and departs at another, we know not whither. It came from the darkness, and returns to it. So it is with the life of roan : But if this new faith instructs us where we go after this existence, it ought to be adopted." Paulinas, the Roman missionary, then addressed the meeting; and so highly was the en thusiasm of Coifi, the ex-pagan, excited by his eloquence, that, rushing from the assembly, he mounted a horse and seized a spear, and, riding to a pagan temple, dart ed his weapon into the building. The multitude, unac customed to see a priest in arms, or on horseback, and believing that the wrath of the gods would instantly consume their insane apostate, no sooner s:tw the tem ple profaned with impunity than they joined in destroy ing it. Sussex was the last converted of the Anglo Saxon kingdoms; it received the new faith about the end of the seventh century. Theodore, archbishop of Canterbury, who died in 690, had lived to see all the Christian churches of England united to a perfect con formity of discipline and worship. Overgrown bishop ricks were divided, and many new ones erected ; and great men were encouraged to build parochial churches, by themselves and their posterity being declared their patrons. A regular provision was made for the clergy throughout all the kingdoms of the heptarchy, by the imposition of a tax in every village, from which the meanest were not exempted ; so that, before the year 700, the church of England was a regularly compact and organized body.
Thus grew the church, till, in the course of succes sive centuries, by draining all the wealth and strength of the country, it might be said to drag down the king dom by the weight of its slothful corpulency. To as cribe the fall of the country, under the Danish and Nor man conquests, to ecclesiastical influence, is hardly an exaggeration, when we reflect, that, at the death of Edward the Confessor, more than one-third of all the lands in England were in the hands of the clergy, for the most part monks, exempted from all taxes, and from military duty. Venerable Bede, himself a monk, complains, in the 8th century, of the enormous increase of monasteries, and predicts that it would emasculate the warlike genius of the nation. The Danish invaders, it is true, who were mostly pagans in the 1 lth century, might have been expected to reduce the plethoric habit of the church, by bleeding its possessions very freely. But although the monasteries suffered chiefly in those depredations, the inhabitants suffered also ; and when the invasion was withdrawn, the poor layman could not redeem his losses by a claim upon the conscience of others. The numbers and wealth of the monks were for ever increasing ; it was thought sufficient to take the cowl to expiate every sin of an ill-spent life ; and by a bequest on death bed of property to the church, the greatest sinners made themselves sure of immortal happiness.