churches, in adjusting the day of keeping Easter;
which depended on a complicated consideration of the course of the sun
and moon; and it happened that the missionaries, who had converted the
Scots and Britons, had followed a different calendar from that which was
observed at Rome, in the age when Augustine converted the Saxons. The
priests also of all the Christian churches were accustomed to shave part
of their head; but the form given to this tonsure was different in the
former from what was practised in the latter. The Scots and Britons
pleaded the antiquity of _their_ usages; the Romans and their
disciples, the Saxons, insisted on the universality of _theirs_.
That Easter must necessarily be kept by a rule, which comprehended both
the day of the year and age of the moon, was agreed by all; that the
tonsure of a priest could not be omitted without the utmost impiety, was
a point undisputed; but the Romans and Saxons called their antagonists
schismatics, because they celebrated Easter on the very day of the full
moon in March, if that day fell on a Sunday, instead of waiting till the
Sunday following; and because they shaved the fore part of their head
from ear to ear, instead of making that tonsure on the crown of the
head, and in a circular form. In order to render their antagonists
odious, they affirmed that, once in seven years, they concurred with the
Jews in the time of celebrating that festival;[*] and that they might
recommend their own form of tonsure, they maintained, that it imitated
symbolically the crown of thorns worn by Christ in his passion; whereas
the other form was invented by Simon Magus, without any regard to that
representation.[**]

[* Bede, lib. ii. cap. 19.]

[** Bede, lib. v. cap. 21. Eddius, sect. 24]

These controversies had, from the beginning, excited such animosity
between the British and Romish priests that, instead of concurring
in their endeavors to convert the idolatrous Saxons, they refused all
communion together, and each regarded his opponent as no better than
a pagan.[*] The dispute lasted more than a century; and was at last
finished, not by men's discovering the folly of it, which would have
been too great an effort for human reason to accomplish, but by the
entire prevalence of the Romish ritual over the Scotch and British.[**]
Wilfrid, bishop of Lindisferne, acquired great merit, both with the
court of Rome and with all the southern Saxons, by expelling the
qua