all before them.
After the final defeat of the Mercians, under their king Penda, at
Winwoed, in 655, the struggle was practically over. Northern and
Southern England were alike once more Christian.

One of the chief agents in this result was the Irish monk Aidan, who had
fixed his seat in the little peninsula of Lindisfarne, and from whose
monastery, as from another Iona, missionaries poured over the North of
England. At Lichfield, Whitby, and many other places religious houses
sprang up, all owing their allegiance to Lindisfarne, and through it to
Iona and Ireland.

In this very fervour there lay the seeds of a new trouble. A serious
schism arose between Western Christendom and the Papacy. Rome, whether
spiritually or temporally, was a name which reverberated with less
awe-inspiring sound in the ears of Irishmen (even Irish Churchmen) than,
probably, in those of any other people at that time on the globe. They
had never come under the tremendous sway of its material power, and
until centuries after this period--when political and, so to speak,
accidental causes drove them into its arms--its spiritual power remained
to them a thing apart, a foreign element to which they gave at most a
reluctant half adhesion.

From this it came about that early in the history of the Western Church
serious divisions sprang up between it and the other churches, already
being fast welded together into a coherent body under the yoke and
discipline of Rome. The points in dispute do not strike us now of any
very vital importance. They were not matters of creed at all, merely of
external rule and discipline. A vehement controversy as to the proper
form of the tonsure, another as to the correct day for Easter, raged for
more than a century with much heat on either side; those churches which
owed their allegiance to Iona clinging to the Irish methods, those who
adhered to Rome vindicating its supreme and paramount authority.

At the Synod of Whitby, held in 664, these points of dispute came to a
crisis, and were adjudicated upon by Oswin, king of Northumbria; Bishop
Colman, Aidan's successor at Holy Island, maintaining the authority of
Columba; Wilfrid, a Saxon priest who had been to Rome, that of St.
Peter. Oswin's own leaning seems at first to have been towards the
former, but when he heard of the great pretensions of the Roman saint he
was staggered. "St. Peter, you say, holds the keys of heaven and hell?"
he inquired thoughtfully, "have