Northumbria was meanwhile receiving the light of faith from the monks of Iona, who, being invited into his kingdom by St. Oswald, in 635, despatched thither the holy bishop Aidan. He chose for the site of his cathedral monastery the island of Lindisfarne, which soon became the ecclesiastical capital of the north of England. This celebrated spot, which is an island only at high tide, and is connected with the mainland when the sea retires by a firm neck of sand, doubtless bears at the present day an aspect very different from that which it presented when the monks raised their first cathedral of oak-planks thatched with reed. The ruins of a far statelier pile may now be seen, built of dark-red sandstone, to which time has given a melancholy hue not out of character with the scene. But there are some features which time itself can never quite efface; the bold promontories of the coast visible to the north and south, the wide expanse of that tossing sea so often ploughed by the keels of the Vikings, and those ruddy golden sands, are unchanged since the days when the brethren of Lindisfarne raised their eyes, weary with the labours of the Scriptorium, to rest them on that beautiful line of wooded coast, or on the sparkling waves beyond it. Their manner of life differed in no degree from that of their brethren at Iona. “It was very different,” says Bede, “from the slothfulness of our times, for all who bore company with Aidan, whether monks or laymen, were employed either in studying the Scriptures or in singing Psalms. This was his own daily employment wherever he went and if it happened that he was invited to eat with the king, he went with one or two clerks, and having taken a small repast, he made haste to be gone with them either to read or write.” All the money that came into his hands he employed in relieving the poor or ransoming slaves, and many of the latter he made his disciples, instructing them and advancing them to the ecclesiastical state.