people not only to their internal dissensions, but to the attacks of the
"Scots" and "Picts," from Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland. Then
followed the conquest of Britain by the English, as the Teutonic
invaders began soon to be called. The Celtic people were largely driven
out, including the Celtic Christians. The English were heathens, and the
Celtic Christians seem to have made no effort whatever for their
conversion. The English, again, were by no means consolidated into an
English nation. It was to one division of these English heathens that
Gregory the Great sent Augustine.

Even the term "the British Church" is somewhat misleading. There is not
the slightest trustworthy evidence, either as to the time when, or the
person by whom, Christianity was introduced into Britain. There, of
course, as everywhere else, the Church was under the rule of bishops;
but, excepting for the purpose of ordaining, the authority of the
British bishops seems to have been entirely overshadowed by the
authority of the abbots of monasteries. There seems, as we have said, no
evidence of anything resembling the patriarchal system among them; nor
of any close or frequent communication between the British churches and
the rest of Christendom. This is proved, among other things, by their
curious reckoning of Easter; which (as Gieseler shows, "Eccle. Hist.,"
ii., 164, English translation) was by no means identical with that of
the Quarto-decimans. It was simply the survival of the use of an old
cycle which had been elsewhere superseded by one more accurate and
convenient.

The ascertainable biography of St. Augustine begins with his mission, by
command of Gregory, to the heathen English; and especially to the
subjects of Ethelbert, King of Kent, who had married a Christian lady.
There is not the slightest reason for discrediting the story related by
Baeda, of the incident which first excited Gregory's interest in the
heathen English. The relations between Britain and Rome having come to
an end, it is not in the least surprising that even a person so
exceptionally well informed should have known nothing about the Teutonic
peoples--Angles, Jutes, Saxons--which had driven out the British. That
he should have played upon words so suggestive as Angli, Deira, and
AElla, is exactly what might be expected from the author of the "Magna
Moralia." The familiar story--he calls it "opinio quae de beato Gregorio
traditione majorum ad nos usque perlat