the moon, was agreed by all; that the tonsure of a
priest could not be omitted without the utmost impiety was a point
undisputed; but the Romans and Saxons called their antagonists
schismatics, because they celebrated Easter on the very day of the full
moon in March, if that day fell on a Sunday, instead of waiting till the
Sunday following; and because they shaved the fore part of their head
from ear to ear, instead of making that tonsure on the crown of the
head, and in a circular form. In order to render their antagonists
odious they affirmed that once in seven years they concurred with the
Jews in the time of celebrating that festival: and that they might
recommend their own form of tonsure they maintained that it imitated
symbolically the crown of thorns worn by Christ in his passion; whereas
the other form was invented by Simon Magus, without any regard to that
representation.

These controversies had from the beginning excited such animosity
between the British and Romish priests that, instead of concurring in
their endeavors to convert the idolatrous Saxons, they refused all
communion together, and each regarded his opponent as no better than a
pagan. The dispute lasted more than a century, and was at last finished,
not by men's discovering the folly of it, which would have been too
great an effort for human reason to accomplish, but by the entire
prevalence of the Romish ritual over the Scotch and British. Wilfrid,
bishop of Lindisferne, acquired great merit, both with the court of
Rome and with all the southern Saxons, by expelling the "quartodeciman"
schism, as it was called, from the Northumbrian kingdom, into which the
neighborhood of the Scots had formerly introduced it.

Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, called, in the year 680, a synod at
Hatfield, consisting of all the bishops in Britain, where was accepted
and ratified the decree of the Lateran council, summoned by Martin,
against the heresy of the Monothelites. The council and synod
maintained, in opposition to these heretics, that, though the divine and
human nature in Christ made but one person, yet had they different
inclinations, wills, acts, and sentiments, and that the unity of the
person implied not any unity in the consciousness. This opinion it seems
somewhat difficult to comprehend; and no one, unacquainted with the
ecclesiastical history of those ages, could imagine the height of zeal
and violence with which it was then inculcated. The d