“It is yours to preach to all the word of God, to all to shine clear in the house of God, that all may recognize through you the light of truth and may be led through the pastures of perpetual beatitude. Your mouth must be the trumpet of the God Christ, for the tongues of your authority are the keys of heaven, having power to open and to shut; to open to the penitent, to shut against those that resist the truth. Wherefore make yourselves by your good lives worthy of such excellence; knowing that assiduity in preaching is the praise of bishops. The episcopal honour is no secular play. The Christian bishop must exercise himself with great diligence in the commands of God, that by example and word together he may educate a Christian people. “The venerable brother the abbat Lull[159] has spoken to me in praise of your good conversation. It is on this account that I have cared to commend myself as a suppliant to your sanctity, that you may order some slight memorial of my name to be made throughout your churches. Not for my own merits but for the love of Christ I have presumed to make this earnest request. Pray grant it, as I trust in your good piety. “May the Lord God increase you by the grace of merits, and make you to advance in all holiness and in preaching the word of God, my most dear and longed-for fathers.” We saw in the previous chapter something of the anxiety which Alcuin felt when he marked the misdeeds of Northumbrian kings. There was another source of anxiety which troubled him in his thoughts of his native land, in the year 795. The old Archbishop of York, Eanbald I (780-796) could evidently not last much longer, and Alcuin feared that the general decadence had reached the ecclesiastics of York, and that some improper appointment might be secured by simoniacal methods. To the old Archbishop himself he wrote an affectionate letter, as follows:— [Sidenote: Ep. 36. A.D. 795.] “To my lord best loved of all health eternal in Christ.