ise its
danger and difficulty at the time. When Augustine reached the shores of
Kent, the successive invasions of the Saxon pirates had set up eight petty
kingdoms upon the ruin of the Roman civilisation and the Christian Church.
The miseries which are covered under those five generations of unrecorded
strife are supposed to have exceeded the misery endured in France, Spain,
Italy, and the Illyrian provinces during the same time. The old inhabitants
were reduced to slavery, or exterminated, or driven to the three corners of
Cornwall, Wales, and Strathclyde. So bitter was the British feeling under
the destruction of their country and the wrongs they had endured, that it
overcame all Christian principle in them, and the Welsh refused all aid to
the Roman missionary in the attempt to convert a race so cruel. It required
all St. Gregory's firmness to induce his own monks to persist. In all the
annals of Christian enterprise during eighteen centuries, there is
probably not one which presented less hope of success than St. Gregory's
resolution to add the spiritual beauty of the Christian to the physical
beauty which he admired in the captives of the Roman forum.

Among those to whom he applied to assist and further his purpose was the
great queen of the Franks. To Brunechild he directed a letter saluting her,
he says, with the charity of a father: "We hear that, by the help of God,
the English people is willing to become Christian; and we recommend the
bearer of these, the servant of God, Augustine, to your Excellency, to help
him in all things, and to protect his work".[202]

It was also to Virgilius, bishop of Arles, and primate of all the Gallic
bishops, as we have seen, by Gregory's own appointment, that he sent
Augustine, after his first success with Ethelbert, to receive episcopal
consecration.

From Gregory's own hand, and in virtue of his apostolic power, England in
its second spring received its division into two provinces, one to be
seated at Canterbury, the other at York. His letters to St. Augustine still
exist to show how he entered into all the difficulties of the missionary,
all the needs of a land in conversion from paganism. From him date the
great prerogatives of the see of Canterbury, extending over the whole
island, inasmuch as it was the matrix of the Church in England. If sons may
deny their father, Englishmen may deny Gregory, and add to schism the guilt
of parricide.

But Gregory was hardly less act