ontiff, encouraged by this blindness and submissive
disposition of the people, advanced every day in his encroachments on
the independence of the English churches. Wilfrid, bishop of
Lindisferne, the sole prelate of the Northumbrian kingdom, increased
this subjection in the eighth century, by his making an appeal to Rome
against the decisions of an English synod, which had abridged his
diocese by the erection of some new bishoprics. Agatho, the pope,
readily embraced this precedent of an appeal to his court; and Wilfrid,
though the haughtiest and most luxurious prelate of his age, having
obtained with the people the character of sanctity, was, thus able to
lay the foundation of this papal pretension.

The great topic by which Wilfrid confounded the imaginations of men was
that St. Peter, to whose custody the keys of heaven were intrusted,
would certainly refuse admittance to everyone who should be wanting in
respect to his successor. This conceit, well suited to vulgar
conceptions, made great impression on the people during several ages,
and has not even at present lost all influence in the Catholic
countries.

Had this abject superstition produced general peace and tranquillity, it
had made some atonement for the ills attending it; but besides the usual
avidity of men for power and riches, frivolous controversies in theology
were engendered by it, which were so much the more fatal as they
admitted not, like the others, of any final determination from
established possession. The disputes, excited in Britain, were of the
most ridiculous kind, and entirely worthy of those ignorant and
barbarous ages. There were some intricacies, observed by all the
Christian 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