d theoretical work has ceased altogether,
and the first stirrings of the new life in the commerce and voyages of
Amalphi, and in the sudden and splendid outburst of Norse life in its
age of piracy, are not yet, are not really before the world until the
time of Alfred of England, of Charles the Bald, of Pope Nicholas I. "the
Great." Yet such as it is, this pilgrim stage of European development
stands for something. Religion, as it is the first agent in forming our
modern nations, is the first impulse towards their expansion. And to us
there is a special interest.

For the best known of western travellers in this darkest of the
Christian ages (600-870 A.D.), Arculf and Willibald, are both connected
with England and the beginnings of English science in the age of Bede.

Arculf, a Frank or Gallican Bishop, who about 690 visited, first of
"Latin" writers since the Mohammedan conquest, Jerusalem, the Jordan
valley, Nazareth, and the other holy places of Syria, was driven by
storms on his return to the great Irish monastery of Iona. There he
described his wonders to the Abbot Adamnan, who then sat in the seat of
the Irish Apostles Patrick and Columba, and by Adamnan this narrative
was presented and dedicated to Aldfrith the Wise, last of the great
Northumbrian Kings, in his Court at York (_c._ A.D. 701). Not only does
the original remain to us, but we have also two summaries of it, one
longer, another shorter, made by Baeda, the Venerable Bede, as a useful
manual for Englishmen, _Concerning the Holy Sites_. We are again
reminded by this how constantly fresh life is growing up under an
appearance of death. The conversion of England, which Gregory the Great,
Theodore, and the Irish monks had carried through in the seventh, that
darkest of Christian centuries, was now bearing its fruit in the work
of Bede, who was really the sign of a far more permanent intellectual
movement than his own, and in that of Boniface, Wilbrord, and Willibald,
who began to win for Christendom in Germany more than a counterpoise for
her losses in the South and East, from Armenia to Spain.

Arculf is full of the mystical unscientific spirit of the time. He notes
in Jerusalem "a lofty column, which at mid-day casts no shadow, thus
proving itself to be the centre of the earth for as David says, 'God is
my king of old, working salvation _in the midst of the_ earth.'"

"At the roots of Lebanon" he comes to the place "where the Jordan has
its rise from two