commend it by good works among his subjects, to suppress the worship of idols, and to follow the
instructions of Augustin.
§ 11. Antagonism of the Saxon and British Clergy.
Bede, II. 2; Haddan and Stubbs, III. 38–41.
Augustin, with the aid of king Ethelbert, arranged (in 602 or 603) a conference with the Britishbishops, at a place in Sussex near the banks of the Severn under an oak, called "Augustin’s Oak."^34
He admonished them to conform to the Roman ceremonial in the observance of Easter Sunday,
and the mode of administering baptism, and to unite with their Saxon brethren in converting the
Gentiles. Augustin had neither wisdom nor charity enough to sacrifice even the most trifling
ceremonies on the altar of peace. He was a pedantic and contracted churchman. He met the Britons,
who represented at all events an older and native Christianity, with the haughty spirit of Rome,
which is willing to compromise with heathen customs, but demands absolute submission from all
other forms of Christianity, and hates independence as the worst of heresies.
The Britons preferred their own traditions. After much useless contention, Augustin proposed,
and the Britons reluctantly accepted, an appeal to the miraculous interposition of God. A blind man
of the Saxon race was brought forward and restored to sight by his prayer. The Britons still refused
to give up their ancient customs without the consent of their people, and demanded a second and
larger synod.
At the second Conference, seven bishops of the Britons, with a number of learned men from
the Convent of Bangor, appeared, and were advised by a venerated hermit to submit the Saxon
archbishop to the moral test of meekness and humility as required by Christ from his followers. If
Augustin, at the meeting, shall rise before them, they should hear him submissively; but if he shall
not rise, they should despise him as a proud man. As they drew near, the Roman dignitary remained
seated in his chair. He demanded of them three things, viz. compliance with the Roman observance
of the time of Easter, the Roman form of baptism, and aid in efforts to convert the English nation;
and then he would readily tolerate their other peculiarities. They refused, reasoning among
themselves, if he will not rise up before us now, how much more will he despise us when we shall
be subject to his authority? Augustin indignantly rebuked them and threatened the divine vengeance
by the arms of the Saxons. "All which," adds Bede, "through the dispensation of the divine judgment,
fell out exactly as he had predicted." For, a few years afterwards (613), Ethelfrith the Wild, the
pagan King of Northumbria, attacked the Britons at Chester, and destroyed not only their army,
but slaughtered several hundred^35 priests and monks, who accompanied the soldiers to aid them
with their prayers. The massacre was followed by the destruction of the flourishing monastery of
Bangor, where more than two thousand monks lived by the labor of their hands.
This is a sad picture of the fierce animosity of the two races and rival forms of Christianity.
Unhappily, it continues to the present day, but with a remarkable difference: the Keltic Irish who,
like the Britons, once represented a more independent type of Catholicism, have, since the Norman
conquest, and still more since the Reformation, become intense Romanists; while the English, once
(^34) On the time and place of the two conferences see the notes in Haddan and Stubbs, III. 40 and 41.
(^35) Bede mentions twelve hundred, but the Saxon chronicle (a. d.607) only two hundred.