The Britons were not heretics, but with the independence which always characterized their race they differed from Rome and from the Eastern Church upon various points of little importance in themselves, though they had often created divisions in Christendom. {30} For no reason that has come down to us the Britons celebrated Easter in accordance with the customs of the Eastern Church--that is to say, at the fourteenth day of the moon, whatever might be the day on which that event fell, in imitation of the Jews who on that day offered up the Paschal lamb. The Western Church, on the contrary, postponed the celebration of Easter till the Sunday following. Nothing more was needed to breed dissensions between the British bishops and the missionaries despatched from Rome by Pope Gregory the Great. For some years previously, Gregory, not yet become a bishop, and being in fact only a simple priest, passing through the slave-market in Rome, had been struck by the handsome appearance of some young persons offered there for sale. Learning that they belonged to the race of Angles, or Saxons, "They would not be Angles but angels," he exclaimed, "if they were Christians;" and he conceived the project of going himself to preach the faith of Jesus Christ to a people so well endowed by nature. His friends were only able to prevail on him to renounce his intention by inducing the Pope to forbid his departure from Rome. When in his turn he was elevated to the episcopal dignity in the most important see of the Western Church, he did not forget the Saxons whose conversion had previously occupied his thoughts. He endeavored first to inflame with his zeal the young slaves whom he had caused to be placed in convents; but the Saxons were apparently not disposed to become Missionaries, for in the year 595 the Pope despatched to Britain a young monk named Augustine, prior of the Convent of St. Andrew at Rome, accompanied by forty friars. They took the road towards Gaul; but they had scarcely arrived at Aix, when they heard such terrible accounts of the ferocity of the Anglo-Saxons that they were alarmed and wrote to the Pope to ask his leave to retrace their footsteps. Gregory, on the contrary, encouraged them to persevere in their enterprise, and furnished with interpreters by the good offices of Brunehaut, who was reigning over Austrasia in the name of her grandsons, they arrived in 597 in the Isle of Thanet. Augustine sent immediately one of his monks to Ethelbert, king of Kent, announcing his intention of coming to preach Christianity to his court. {31}