And then St. Augustine, as soon as he received the bishop-seat in the
royal city, renewed and wrought, with the King's help, the church which
he had learnt was wrought long before by old Roman work, and hallowed it
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; and he there set a dwelling-place
for himself and all his after-followers. He likewise built a monastery
by east of the city, in which Ethelbert the King, by his exhortation and
advice, ordered to build a church worthy of the blessed apostles Peter
and Paul, and he enriched it with various gifts, in which church the
body of Augustine, and of all the Canterbury bishops together, and of
their kings, might be laid. The church, however, not Augustine, but
Bishop Laurentius, his after-follower, hallowed.
The first abbot at the same monastery was a mass-priest named Peter, who
was sent back as a messenger into the kingdom of Gaul, and then was
drowned in a bay of the sea, which was called Amfleet, and was laid in
an unbecoming grave by the inhabitants of the place. But the Almighty
God would show of what merit the holy man was, and every night a
heavenly light was made to shine over his grave, until the neighbors,
who saw it, understood that it was a great and holy man who was buried
there; and they then asked who and whence he was: they then took his
body, and laid and buried it in a church in the city of Boulogne, with
the honor befitting so great and so holy a man.
Then it was that Augustine, with the help of King Ethelbert, invited to
his speech the bishops and teachers of the Britons, in the place which
is yet named Augustine's Oak, on the borders of the Hwiccii and West
Saxons. And he then began, with brotherly love, to advise and teach
them, that they should have right love and peace between them, and
undertake, for the Lord, the common labor of teaching divine lore in the
English nation. And they would not hear him, nor keep Easter at its
right tide, and also had many other things unlike and contrary to
ecclesiastical unity. When they had held a long conference and strife
about those things, and they would not yield any things to Augustine's
instructions, nor to his prayers, nor to his threats, and [those] of his
companions, but thought their own customs and institutions better than
[that] they should agree with all Christ's churches throughout the
world; then the holy father Augustine put an end to this troublesome
strife, and thus spoke:
"Let us pray Almighty God, who makes the one-minded to dwell in his
Father's house, that he vouchsafe to signify to us by heavenly wonders
which institution we ought to follow, by what ways to hasten to the
entrance of his kingdom. Let an infirm man be brought hither to us, and,
through whose prayer soever he be healed, let his belief and practice be
believed acceptable to God, and to be followed by all."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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