This superficial, wholesale conversion to a nominal Christianity must be regarded in the
light of a national infant-baptism. It furnished the basis for a long process of Christian education.
The barbarians were children in knowledge, and had to be treated like children. Christianity, assumed
the form of a new law leading them, as a schoolmaster, to the manhood of Christ.
The missionaries of the middle ages were nearly all monks. They were generally men of
limited education and narrow views, but devoted zeal and heroic self-denial. Accustomed to primitive
simplicity of life, detached from all earthly ties, trained to all sorts of privations, ready for any
amount of labor, and commanding attention and veneration by their unusual habits, their celibacy,
fastings and constant devotions, they were upon the whole the best pioneers of Christianity and
civilization among the savage races of Northern and Western Europe. The lives of these missionaries
are surrounded by their biographers with such a halo of legends and miracles, that it is almost
impossible to sift fact from fiction. Many of these miracles no doubt were products of fancy or
fraud; but it would be rash to deny them all.
The same reason which made miracles necessary in the first introduction of Christianity,
may have demanded them among barbarians before they were capable of appreciating the higher
moral evidences.
I. THE CONVERSION OF ENGLAND, IRELAND, AND SCOTLAND.
§ 7. Literature.
I. Sources.
Gildas (Abbot of Bangor in Wales, the oldest British historian, in the sixth cent.): De excidio
Britanniae conquestus, etc. A picture of the evils of Britain at the time. Best ed. by Joseph
Stevenson, Lond., 1838. (English Historical Society’s publications.)
Nennius (Abbot of Bangor about 620): Eulogium Britanniae, sive Historia Britonum. Ed. Stevenson,
1838.
The Works of Gildas and Nennius transl. from the Latin by J. A. Giles, London, 1841.
Beda Venerabilis (d. 734): Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum; in the sixth vol. of Migne’s
ed. of Bedae Opera Omnia, also often separately published and translated into English. Best
ed. by Stevenson, Lond., 1838; and by Giles, Lond., 1849. It is the only reliable church-history
of the Anglo-Saxon period.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, from the time of Caesar to 1154. A work of several successive hands,
ed. by Gibson with an Engl. translation, 1823, and by Giles, 1849 (in one vol. with Bede’s
Eccles. History).
See the Six Old English Chronicles, in Bohn’s Antiquarian Library (1848); and Church Historians
of England trans. by Jos. Stevenson, Lond. 1852–’56, 6 vols.
Sir. Henry Spelman (d. 1641): Concilia, decreta, leges, constitutiones in re ecclesiarum orbis
Britannici, etc. Lond., 1639–’64, 2 vols. fol. (Vol. I. reaches to the Norman conquest; vol. ii.
to Henry VIII).
David Wilkins (d. 1745): Concilia Magnae Britanniae et Hiberniae (from 446 to 1717), Lond.,
1737, 4 vols. fol. (Vol. I. from 446 to 1265).
Arthur West Haddan and William Stubbs: Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great
Britain and Ireland: edited after Spelman and Wilkins. Oxford (Clarendon Press), 1869 to ’78.
So far 3 vols. To be continued down to the Reformation.