It was not to Rome only that Alfred sent messengers and gifts. Asser speaks, with Celtic breadth, of daily embassies sent to foreign nations, from the Tyrrhenian sea to the farthest end of Ireland.[15] The English Chronicle goes further. Alfred vowed, it is said, when they were set against the enemy in London, to send embassies to St. Thomas and St. Bartholomew. The Chronicle, under the year 883, tells us that he sent gifts to India. William of Malmesbury informs us that Sigelm, Bishop of Sherborne, was sent as ambassador with the gifts to St. Thomas, and that he prosperously penetrated into India. Thus, Dean Hook remarks, the first intercourse between England and Hindustan consisted of this interchange of Christian feeling. It is, however, a little curious that Asser never mentions India, nor did Alfred interpolate any mention of his embassy when translating Orosius for his English people. Asser definitely mentions Judea, telling us that he had seen letters to Alfred which came with presents from Abel the Patriarch of Jerusalem. It may be worth mention that other MSS. of the English Chronicle read Iudia and Iudea instead of India. Still, the fact of the journey of Alfred’s messengers to some distant part which then bore the name of India, seems to be accepted on all hands. There is no very violent improbability about it. Christian missionaries from Persia had reached India and China more than three centuries before this, two of them bringing the silk-worm to the Greek empire in Justinian’s reign, about 550. The Egyptian merchant-monk Cosmas wrote his _Christian Topography_ at that date. He found Nestorian Christians in Ceylon and Malabar, but the king and people of Ceylon were still heathens. Alfred’s Ecclesiastical Laws have a long preface, apparently prepared by himself. It is an interesting piece of argument. First he gives the Ten Commandments in Saxon. Writers inform us that he omits the Second Commandment, in accordance with the evil practice which had already made considerable progress then; but probably these writers did not read to the end, for Alfred’s Tenth Commandment is, “Thou shalt not make to thyself golden gods nor silvern.” Then he points out that our Saviour, Christ, said He came not to break nor forbid these Commandments, but with all good to increase them, and mercy and humility He taught. Then he quotes the decisions of the church at Jerusalem as to the tenderness of the application of the law to the Gentile converts. When the English race became Christian, he proceeds, they held synods of holy bishops and great and wise men. They then ordained, out of that mercy which Christ had taught, that secular lords, by the synod’s leave, might without sin take for almost every misdeed, for the first offence, the money fine ordained by the synod. They then in many synods ordained a fine for many human misdeeds, and in many synod-books they wrote, at one place one doom, at another another.