It is scarcely less disgusting than instructive to trace throughout the middle ages the growing foliage of superstition, that cast its dim and lengthening shadow over the lovely temple of religion. And when it was the received creed of the time, that donations to the church, of which the bishop of Rome was falsely regarded as the head, were sufficient to compensate for the most heinous crimes, it cannot be surprising that the regal homicide should pay his court to the prevailing idol, or that the wide domains of the wealthy and noble sensualist should in his dying hour (no longer, then, of service to pander to his appetites,) be transferred to the service of that all-powerful agency which professed itself alike enabled to quench the fires of purgatory and unbar the portals of the mansions of eternal bliss! Offa, the proud and conquering king, stripped of its vested rights the ancient province of Canterbury to aggrandize with spiritual supremacy his own domains[23]--Offa, the daring and ambitious prince, yielded to the evil suggestions of tempting opportunity, and with a bold and bloody hand seized the broad lands of the sainted martyr Ethelbert. But Offa the pilgrim, the penitent, the failing and remorseful monarch, over whom the feeble halo of an earthly fame had passed and left no bright and pleasing memory behind--Offa, who felt his time at hand and looked through the hazy superstition of a corrupted church upon a vision of purchasable happiness in heaven “in testimony of repentance for the blood that he had spilled, bestowed a tenth of all his goods on the churchmen and on the poor,”[24] built churches, founded abbeys, and endowed monasteries,[25] to bribe the God whose laws he had infringed, and bargain at a price for the salvation which had been freely offered! [Footnote 23: In addition to this (viz., the transference of the primacy from Canterbury to Lichfield) he committed other arbitrary depredations on the church. “He seizeth on churches and other religious houses,” says Holinshed. “A downright pilferer,” says William of Malmsbury, “he converted to his own use the lands of many churches, of which Malmsbury was one.” Everth (Egfrid), however, on his coming to the throne, restored to the monasteries the possessions which had been misapplied in former reigns: and gave Malmsbury into the hands of Cuthbert, then abbot of that place.] [Footnote 24: Speed’s Chronicle, p. 345.] [Footnote 25: There is considerable difficulty as to the dates of some of Offa’s endowments and foundations. His endowment of the English college at Rome (_Matth. West. A. D. 794_), his making Mercia tributary to the See of Rome (_Holinshed, ch. 4, b. 6, vol. 2._), and his erection and endowment of St. Albans over the body of the English protomartyr, were all subsequent to the murder of Ethelbert. Some of his other donations to the church were as follows: viz.--