I cannot tell you all the good things that were secured to Englishmen by this great deed, but there was one thing which, above all others, it gained for them--and gained for us as well--Justice. It is one of our proudest boasts that, by English law, no man, be he ever so poor or degraded, is condemned unheard; that every man is counted innocent till, by a fair trial, he is proved to be guilty. And the very foundation of our freedom rests on some words that were written that day on that old parchment: ‘_We will sell to no man, we will not delay nor deny to any man, justice or right_.’ But if the great bell of St. Paul’s could call the citizens to fight for their liberty as Englishmen against the oppression of the King, it could also summon them to fight for their liberty as Churchmen against the oppression of the Pope. We must always remember that when first Christianity was brought to England, in the time of the Romans, and the ancient British Church was formed, it did not owe allegiance to the Bishops of Rome as it did in later days. It was only after it had been swept away by the invasion of the Angles and Saxons, and then brought back again to the South of England by St. Augustine, who came direct from Pope Gregory of Rome, that the belief arose that it was right that the Church of England should be ruled by the Pope. [Illustration: SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN From a painting by Sir G. Kneller in the National Portrait Gallery, London (_Page 38_)] Up in the North, on the other hand, in Scotland and in Northumbria, where Christianity had been brought by St. Columba and his followers, who, as you remember, came from Ireland, it was a very much longer time before the Church would admit the Papal claims, though at last it did so. And St. Aidan and St. Cuthbert, who founded the Northumbrian Church, being missionaries from the ancient British Church, which St. Columba represented, did not feel obliged to obey the Pope in the same way that St. Augustine did. It would take me too long to tell you about the differences that existed between the Church in the North and that in the South, the chief of which was that they did not keep the festival of Easter on the same day. The Church of St. Augustine, following the example of Rome, kept it on one day; the Church of St. Columba, following the example of the British and Eastern Churches, observed it some ten days later, as the Russians and Greeks do still. But as time went on the rule of the Pope began to weigh heavily upon the English people. They thought that they had the right to elect their own Bishops and Archbishops, while the Pope thought that he had the right to do so, and at first he very often sent foreigners to fill the English Sees.