Alfred’s relations to the Church were wholly without a cloud or a blot—alike free from the violence or the impolicy which too often discredited even the noblest sovereigns of his age. From the hour when the child Prince of four was anointed by Pope Leo in Rome, down to the day when the Canons laid his bones in the Old Minster of Winchester, the career of Alfred presents to us the purest type of the normal relations between the temporal and spiritual powers—a type of more wisdom than that of St. Henry or St. Louis, more truly spiritual than that of the Emperors Charles or Otto. To Alfred, Religion, Culture, Intelligence had no local limits. He was essentially European, even cosmopolitan, in his genius. As a boy he had witnessed the inauguration of the new Papal Rome on the Vatican. He had been at the Court of the great Frank King, whose daughter became his step-mother; he had known all that was foremost in the civilisation of the century: he resolved to transplant it to England. His missions were his message to the world that Britain was no longer an _ultima Thule_, but henceforth was to march in the van of Progress. He was, says Freeman, “the spiritual and intellectual leader of his people.” It is in his own writings that we come to love Alfred best. No ruler of men has left us so pellucid a revelation of his own soul. As in _Meditations_ of Aurelius and the Psalms of David, there is given to men the outpourings of his aspirations and his sorrows. Neither Richelieu, Cromwell, nor William the Silent ever recorded more frankly their problems and their aims. In the authentic writings of Alfred we are in the presence of one who is a teacher as much as a king—who recalls to us Augustine and à-Kempis, or Bunyan and Jeremy Taylor. His _Boethius_ served him as texts whereon he preached to his people profound sermons on the moral and spiritual life. Read his homily on Riches—“that it is better to give than to receive,”—on the true Ruler—“that power is never a good, unless he be good that has it,”—on the uses of Adversity—“no wise man should desire a soft life.” Few men ever had so hard a life—with his mysterious and cruel malady—“his thorn in the flesh” until his early death—with his distracted and ruined kingdom—his ferocious enemies—his never-ending cares. And amidst it all we have the king in his silent study pouring out poetic thoughts upon married love, or friendship, on true happiness, or the inner life, composing pastoral poetry, or casting into English old idylls from Greek epic or myth, ending with some magnificent _Te Deum_ of his own composition.