entered Canterbury bearing before them a silver cross
with a picture of Christ, and singing in concert the strains of the
litany of their church. "Turn from this city, O Lord," they sang, "thine
anger and wrath, and turn it from thy holy house, for we have sinned."
And then in strange contrast came the jubilant cry of the older Hebrew
worship, the cry which Gregory had wrested in prophetic earnestness from
the name of the Yorkshire king in the Roman market-place,
"Alleluia!"[48]

It was thus that the spot which witnessed the landing of Hengist became
yet better known as the landing-place of Augustine. But the second
landing at Ebbsfleet was in no small measure a reversal and undoing of
the first. "Strangers from Rome" was the title with which the
missionaries first fronted the English King. The march of the monks as
they chanted their solemn litany was in one sense a return of the Roman
legions who withdrew at the trumpet-call of Alaric. It was to the tongue
and the thought not of Gregory only, but of the men whom his Jutish
fathers had slaughtered or driven out that Ethelbert listened in the
preaching of Augustine.

Canterbury, the earliest royal city of German England, became a centre
of Latin influence. The Roman tongue became again one of the tongues of
Britain, the language of its worship, its correspondence, its
literature. But more than the tongue of Rome returned with Augustine.
Practically his landing renewed that union with the western world which
the landing of Hengist had destroyed. The new England was admitted into
the older commonwealth of nations. The civilization, art, letters, which
had fled before the sword of the English conquerors returned with the
Christian faith. The great fabric of the Roman law indeed never took
root in England, but it is impossible not to recognize the result of the
influence of the Roman missionaries in the fact that codes of the
customary English law began to be put in writing soon after their
arrival.

A year passed before Ethelbert yielded to the preaching of Augustine.
But from the moment of his conversion the new faith advanced rapidly and
the Kentish men crowded to baptism in the train of their King. The new
religion was carried beyond the bounds of Kent by the supremacy which
Ethelbert wielded over the neighboring kingdoms. Sebert, king of the
East Saxons, received a bishop sent from Kent, and suffered him to build
up again a Christian church in what was now his subj