In every order alike, however, an economic interest was sooner or later the ruling motive. Beneficed priests wrought for the church under which they had their income, keeping as much of it as they could, but recognizing the need for official union; and the monastic orders in their turn grew wealthy by endowments, and zealous in proportion for the temporal power of the Church. As always, the self-denying and devoted were a minority; but the worldly and the unworldly alike wrought everywhere in the political interests of the kings, who had established and endowed the Church to begin with, and who in return were long allowed many liberties in the appointment and control of bishops and priests. A common result was the appointment of lay favourites or benefactors of the king; and bishoprics seem almost as often as not to have been in some degree purchasable. The Church, in short, was a social and political function of each State, with the papal system loosely and variably co-ordinating the whole. § 2. Methods of Expansion Every extension of the Church being a means of power and revenue to priests, the process was furthered at once by motives of selfishness and by motives of self-sacrifice. In some cases the latter were effectual, as when a pious hermit won repute among barbarians for sanctity, and so acquired spiritual influence; but the normal mode of conversion seems to have been by way of appeal to chiefs or kings. When these were convinced that Christianity was to their interest, the baptism of their more docile subjects followed wholesale. Thus ten thousand Angli were claimed as baptized by Augustine in Kent on Christmas Day in the year 597--a transaction which reduced the rite to nullity, and the individuality of the converts to the level of that of animals. In this case there can have been no rational consent. A little later, Heraclius in the East caused multitudes of Jews to be dragged to baptism by force; and the same course was taken in Spain and Gaul. Jews so coerced were only more anti-Christian than before; and wholesale relapses of barbarian converts were nearly as common as the wholesale captures, till the cause of kings won the mastery. Nowhere does the Church seem to have grown from within and upward among the barbarians as it had originally done in the empire: the process is invariably one of imposition from without and above, by edicts of kings, who supported the missionaries with the sword. As at the outset of the Church, there were deadly strifes among the pioneers. The earlier British Church having been formed under influences from Ireland, there was such utter hatred between its remnants and the Romanized Church set up by Augustine that, apparently after his death, twelve hundred monks of the older church were massacred at Bangor in one of the wars between the two Christian parties; and the Britons, not unnaturally, refused to have any intercourse with their brethren, regarding them as worse than heathens.