nected with it. The destruction of this beautiful and venerable fabric is one of the crimes by which our Reformation was disgraced.

The first man who laid down his life in Britain for the Christian faith, was Saint Alban; Saint he has been called for that reason, and the title may be continued to him in mark of honour and respect, now that it has ceased to carry with it a superstitious meaning to our ears. During the tenth and most rigorous of the persecutions, which was the only one that extended to this island, a Christian priest, flying from his persecutors, came to the city of Verulamium, and took shelter in Alban's house; he, not being of the faith himself, concealed him for pure compassion; but when he observed the devotion of his guest, how fervent it was and how firm, and the consolation and the joy which he appeared to find in prayer, his heart was touched; and he listened to his teaching, and became a believer. Meantime the persecutors traced the object of their pursuit to this city, and discovered his retreat. But when they came to search the house, Alban, putting on the hair cassock of his teacher, delivered himself into their hands as if he had been the fugitive, and was carried before the heathen governor; while the man whom they sought had leisure and opportunity to provide for his escape. Because he refused either to betray his guest, or offer sacrifice to the Roman gods, he was scourged, and then led to execution upon the spot where the abbey now stands, which, in after-times, was erected to his memory, and still bears his name. That spot was then a beautiful meadow on a little rising ground, "seeming," says the Venerable Bede, "a fit theatre for the martyr's triumph." There he was beheaded, and a soldier also at the same time; who, it is said, was so affected by the resignation and magnanimity of this virtuous sufferer, that he chose to suffer with him rather than incur the guilt of being his executioner.' Monkish writers have disfigured the story with many fictions in their wonted manner, but there is no reason to question that the main facts are historical truths. Others of our countrymen, some few whose names alone are preserved, and more of whom all memory has perished, laid down their lives under the same persecution. Concerning them, the worthy Fuller has beautifully said, "It

1 Beda, 1. i. c. 7.

was superstition in the Athenians to build an altar to the unknown God, but it would be piety in us here to erect a monument in memorial of these unknown martyrs, whose names are lost. The best is, God's kalendar is more complete than man's best martyrologies; and their names are written in the book of life, who, on earth, are wholly forgotten."

This was the last persecution under the heathen emperors; shortly afterwards Christianity became the religion of the Roman empire, in an evil age, when corruptions of every kind, both in religious and secular affairs, were making a rapid and destructive progress; and when the Christian world was disturbed with acrimonious disputes concerning high mysteries, and abstruse points, which the limited intellect of man cannot comprehend, which have been left indefinite by the revealed word of God, and which for us to attempt to define is equally presumptuous and vain. No records of the British church during that age are extant; for the existing legends of the British and Irish saints, who are placed in those times, are as little connected with historical truth, as the stories of the Round Table, the romances of Amadis and his descendants, or the ideal state of pastoral Arcadia, as imagined by the poets. Thus much, however, is known, that these islands did not escape the contagious errors which were then prevailing. Monachism, in its first stage, when it had nothing useful or ornamental to compensate for its preposterous austerities, was introduced here; and pilgrims went from hence, not only to visit Jerusalem, whither a pardonable, if not a meritorious, feeling of devotion might lead them,... but to behold and reverence, like a living idol, a maniac' in Syria, who, under that burning climate, passed his life upon the top of a lofty column, and vied with the yoguees of India in the folly and perseverance with which he inflicted voluntary torments upon himself. This too is known, that the ancient British heathenism was zealously preserved and propagated by the Bards, and by the remains of the Druids; of whom some taught it in its original state, and others mingled with it some things which they borrowed from Christianity. And it may be presumed that the heathenism of the Romans also still lingered here, though it was 2 See Mr. Davies's Celtic Researches, and his Mythology

Collier, i. 40. of the Druids.

not cherished with the same zeal, being unconnected with old remembrances and national feeling, and having never made its way into the northern, nor perhaps into the mountainous parts of the island. This certainly was losing ground; and the old national heathenism was probably gaining it, in proportion as the Roman power declined, and the Caledonian tribes extended their invasion southward, when to repel these invaders the Saxons were invited, and settling in the land as conquerors, introduced with them another system of heathen idolatry.

The Saxons, Angles, and other kindred tribes, to whom we are indebted for the basis and the character of our fine language, and of our invaluable civil institutions, were at the time of their establishment here a ferocious people, but not without noble qualities, apt for instruction, and willing to be instructed. The heathenism which they introduced bears no affinity either to that of the Britons or of the Romans. It is less known than either, because while it subsisted as a living form of belief, the few writers who arose in those illiterate ages were incurious concerning such things: but it has left familiar traces in our daily speech, and in many of those popular customs which in various parts of the country still partially maintain their ground. They had idols wrought in wood, stone, and metals of different kinds, even in gold:.. this fact implies considerable proficiency in art, beyond that to which the ancient Britons had attained. One of these idols was designed as standing upon a fish, others as having many heads; a gross but intelligible mode of representing to the senses of a rude people, that the gods whom they worshipped beheld the actions which were done on all sides. The latter images may be thought to imply by their fashion a Tartaric origin; the former may not improbably be referred through the same channel to India, and perhaps to the corrupted tradition of the Deluge, which seems to have been preserved wherever ancient traditions are found. They had temples, a ritual worship, and a regular priesthood. The rites were bloody. The Saxons on the Continent are known to have decimated their prisoners for sacrifice. But there is some reason to infer, that the priests, when they accompanied the conquerors hither, had attained to that stage of intellectual advancement, wherein it became their wish so to direct their influence as to mitigate, rather than in

crease, the evils to which their fellow-creatures were liable in an

age of violence and incessant war. From the Saxons it is that we derive the holy name of God; its literal meaning was the Good; and we must acknowledge the propriety of that reverential feeling which induced them thus to express goodness and divinity by the same word. The enclosures of their temples were held to be profaned if a lance were thrown into them: and the priests were not permitted to bear arms, nor to ride like warriors on horseback,... only upon mares. When the image of their goddess Hertha, or Mother Earth, was borne abroad in a covered carriage, so long as it continued without the consecrated precincts, all hostilities were suspended, and nothing was thought of but festivity and joy. At the expiration of this festival, which otherwise might seem to have been instituted in favour of humanity, the vehicle, the garment which covered it, and the idol itself, were washed by slaves in a lake which none but the servants of the goddess were allowed to approach, and after this ceremony, the slaves were sacrificed by drowning. They worshipped the Sun and Moon, the Thunderer, and Odin, the favourite god of those who settled in this island, because he was a deified warrior from whom the kings of the different kingdoms of the Heptarchy traced their descent. Of the other objects of their mistaken worship little more than a few names can now be ascertained. That of the goddess Eostre, or Eastre, which may probably be traced to the Astarte of the Phenicians, is retained among us in the word Easter, her annual festival having been superseded by that sacred day.

The change produced in Britain by the Saxon conquest was greater than that which took place in any other part of the Western Empire, when it was broken up, and divided among the Gothic conquerors. Every where else they soon conformed to the religion, and intermingled with the inhabitants, of the conquered provinces, so that a mixed speech presently grew up, retaining more traces of its Roman than of its Barbaric origin. But the Roman tongue, and the Roman religions, the unfashionable and unpatronized rites of its perishing Paganism, as well as the flourishing forms of its corrupted Christianity, were at once swept away from that largest and finest portion of Britain in which the conquerors fixed themselves; and the Saxons estab

lished their heathen superstition and their language, without any compromise or commixture. Some mixture of races there must have been, but it was too partial to produce any perceptible effect. This remarkable and singular fact is to be explained by the condition in which they found the island. During the decline of the Roman empire, then in the last stage of its decay, the Britons had shaken off an authority, which, easy and greatly beneficial as it had proved upon the whole, was insufferable to their national feeling,.... a stubborn and haughty feeling, but of a noble kind. They succeeded to their own undoing. A deplorable state of anarchy and intestine war ensued, during which the greater part of those persons who considered the Latin as their mother tongue,... in other words, the cultivated part of the population,... either fled the country, or were cut off. The Britons themselves were divided into an unknown number of petty kingdoms, and their princes were animated with as much hostility against each other as against the invaders. But they were too high-minded to brook that forced and ignominious incorporation to which the Gauls, and Spaniards, and Italians had submitted; and gradually retiring to the western peninsula, to the land of Lakes, and to the Highlands of Scotland, their language ceased to be spoken in that great division of the island which now obtained the name of England from its Anglian conquerors. The priests and monks withdrew with them, as well as the less placable votaries of the old Druidical faith; and Christianity, as a public establishment, disappeared from the kingdoms of the Heptarchy for about an hundred and fifty years.