Thus it seemed that the seed sown by Augustine, which had sprung up so quickly, having no deepness of earth, was about to wither away as quickly before the parching blasts of persecution. A dream, or a trance, or a mysterious mental struggle through which Archbishop Laurentius passed, prevented the utter abandonment of the great enterprise. In the night before his intended departure from Britain, having laid him down to rest in a chamber of the monastery dedicated by Augustine to St. Peter and St. Paul, Laurentius saw in a vision the Apostle Peter who indignantly rebuked him for his faint-hearted desertion of the flock committed to his care. With every sentence came a blow from the apostolic scourge on the shoulders of the faint-hearted archbishop, and this chastisement endured through many hours of the secret and solitary night. In the morning Laurentius found that his back was covered with wales from St. Peter’s lash, and going straight to the palace he showed his wounds to the king. Eadbald asked in wrath who had dared thus to chastise so eminent a man, and being told that it was the long dead apostle of Christ, he was stricken with fear, abandoned his idolatrous rites, put away his forbidden wife, received baptism, and thenceforward promoted to the utmost of his power the cause of the new religion.[52] Thus then Laurentius did not take his hand from the plough. His brethren, Mellitus and Justus, were recalled by Eadbald from Gaul, but the newly converted king, less powerful than his father, availed not to persuade the stubborn Londoners to receive Mellitus into their midst. Not long after (February 2, 619) Laurentius himself died, and was succeeded in the archiepiscopal see by Mellitus. He too died (April 24, 624) after a five years’ tenure of office, and was succeeded by Justus. Thus, one after another, Pope Gregory’s missionaries were passing away, and their bodies were laid in the portico which, like the great _atrium_ of the church of St. Ambrose at Milan, stood in front of the slowly reared church of St. Peter and St. Paul. But the Christianity of the Saxons in the south was still but a sickly and shallow-rooted plant. It was left for the Angles of Northumbria to show a genuine, hearty, popular conversion to the new faith, and to produce that splendid series of saintly kings, bishops and princesses who have made the seventh century for ever memorable in the history of English Christianity. CHAPTER VIII. EDWIN OF DEIRA.