offences; it enjoins the golden rule (in the negative form), not to do to any man what we would not
have done to us.^419
"In all these words of human brotherhood, of piety, and the spirit of justice, of pity and
humanity, uttered by the barbaric lawgivers of a wild race, there speaks a great Personality—the
embodiment of the highest sympathy and most disinterested virtue of mankind. It cannot be said
indeed that these religious influences, so apparently genuine, produced any powerful effect on
society in Anglo-Saxon England, though they modified the laws. Still they began the history of the
religious forces in England which, though obscured by much formalism and hypocrisy and weakened
by selfishness, have yet worked out slowly the great moral and humane reforms in the history of
that country, and have tended with other influences to make it one of the great leaders of modern
progress."^420
Notes.
John Richard Green, in his posthumous work, The Conquest of England (N. York ed. 1884,
p. 179 sq.), pays the following eloquent and just tribute to the character of King Aelfred (as he
spells the name): "Aelfred stands in the forefront of his race, for he is the noblest as he is the most
complete embodiment of all that is great, all that is lovable in the English temper, of its practical
energy, its patient and enduring force, of the reserve and self-control that give steadiness and
sobriety to a wide outlook and a restless daring, of its temperance and fairness, its frankness and
openness, its sensitiveness to affection, its poetic tenderness, its deep and reverent religion. Religion,
indeed, was the groundwork of Aelfred’s character. His temper was instinct with piety. Everywhere,
throughout his writings that remain to us, the name of God, the thought of God, stir him to outbursts
of ecstatic adoration. But of the narrowness, the want of proportion, the predominance of one quality
over another, which commonly goes with an intensity of religious feeling or of moral purpose, he
showed no trace. He felt none of that scorn of the world about him which drove the nobler souls
of his day to monastery or hermitage. Vexed as he was by sickness and constant pain, not only did
his temper take no touch of asceticism, but a rare geniality, a peculiar elasticity and mobility of
nature, gave color and charm to his life .... Little by little men came to recognize in Aelfred a ruler
of higher and nobler stamp than the world had seen. Never had it seen a king who lived only for
the good of his people .... ’I desire,’ said the king, ’to leave to the men that come after me a
remembrance of me in good works. His aim has been more than fulfilled .... While every other
name of those earlier times has all but faded from the recollection of Englishmen, that of Aelfred
remains familiar to every English child.’
CHAPTER X.
WORSHIP AND CEREMONIES.
Comp. vol. III. ch. VII., and Neander III. 123–140; 425–455 (Boston ed.).
§ 92. The Mass.
Comp. vol. III. § 96–101 and the liturgical Lit. there quoted; also the works on Christian and
Ecclesiastical Antiquities, e.g. Siegel III. 361–411.
(^419) I For further information on Alfred see the biographies of Pauli (1851, Engl. transl. by Thorpe, 1853), Weiss (1852),
Hughes (Lond. and Bost. 1869), Freeman’s Old English History, and Green’s Conquest of England (1884), ch. IV. 124-180.
(^420) Brace, Gesta Christi, p. 216.