work. It is only fair
to the later Romano-Britons, to remember that all the flower of the youth
of Britain had been carried away by one general and emperor after another,
to fight the battles of Rome, or to support the claims of a usurper of the
imperial purple, in Gaul and Spain and Italy; and when the imperial
troops were finally withdrawn, the older men and the less hardy of the
youths of Britain were left to cope with enemies who had baffled the Roman
arms.

So much for the Britons. As for the Celts, we have sufficient evidence
that the message of Christ was taken to them and welcomed by them in the
later parts of the period ending with 450. During the years of the
struggle between the Britons and their Teutonic invaders, say from 450 to
590, this Christianising went on among the Celts. About the end of that
period it reached even to the furthest parts of the north, the parts
which, in the early times of the Roman occupation, were probably held by
descendants of the earlier race, and it more or less covered Ireland.

Thus the knowledge of the Christian faith had, before the English came,
extended over the whole of that part of this island which the English
invaders in their furthest reach ever occupied. It had covered--and it
continued to cover, and has never ceased to cover--very much that they
never even touched. To convert the early English to Christ, which was the
task undertaken by Augustine, a very small part of it being accomplished
by him or his mission from first to last, was to restore Christianity to
those parts from which the English had driven it out. It was to remove
the barrier of heathendom which the English invaders had formed between
the Church universal and the Celtic and British church or churches. It
proved in the end that the undertaking was much beyond the powers of the
Italian missionaries; and then the earlier church stepped in from its
confines in the West and did the work. It was so that the great English
province of Northumbria--meaning vastly more than Northumberland, even all
the land from Humber to Forth--was evangelized. It was so that the great
English province of Mercia--the whole of the middle of the
island--received the message of Christ. It was so that Christianity was
given back to Essex and to us in London, by the labours of our Bishop
Cedd, consecrated, as the crown of his long and faithful labours among our
heathen predecessors, by the Celtic Bishop Finan of Lindisfarne. Ced