When the English, under the seven or eight struggling and quarrelling dynasties whose battles form for centuries all the recorded life of the island, were seven or eight distinct nationalities,--some of them tribally connected, some of them using allied systems of law, but otherwise having scarcely anything in common beyond dialects of a common growing language,--altogether without any common organization or the desire of forming one,--the conversion in the seventh century taught them to regard themselves as one people. They were formed by St. Gregory and Archbishop Theodore into an organized Christian Church, the several dioceses of which represented the several kingdoms or provinces of their divided state. [Sidenote: National unity first realized. ] Thus arranged in one or, later on, in two ecclesiastical provinces, the wise men of the several tribes learned to act in concert; the tribes themselves, casting aside their tribal superstitions for a common worship, found how few real obstacles there were to prevent them from acting as one people; and from the date of the conversion the tendency of the kingdoms was to unite rather than to break up. Although this process was slow--for it went on for four centuries, and was scarcely completed when the Norman Conquest forced the mass of varied national elements into cohesion--it was a uniform tendency, contrasted with, and counteracting numerous and varying tendencies towards separation. The Church built up the unity of the State, and in so doing it built up the unity of the nation. [Sidenote: Great power of the clergy. ] And one result of this was to make the Church extremely powerful in the state. There was but one archbishop of Canterbury when there were seven kings; that archbishop’s word was listened to with respect and obeyed in all the seven kingdoms, in any one of which the command of a strange king would have been received with contempt. The archbishop was exceedingly powerful, both in Kent, his peculiar diocese, and by his alliances with the states and churches of the Continent; and the diocesan bishops were each, in his own district, a match for their kings, because they knew that in any struggle they could depend on the friendship of all their fellows outside their special kingdom, much more than the peccant king could depend on the assistance of his fellow-kings. They could meet in one council, whilst the several kings could only collect their own Witenagemots; they were, in fact, the rulers of the Church of England, whilst the kings were only kings of Kent, Mercia and Wessex. And when the kingdoms became one under the descendants of Egbert the prelates retained the same power. [Sidenote: Alliance of Church and State. ]