The earliest bishops among the Saxons were necessarily strangers. Romans occupied the cathedral thrones of Canterbury, Rochester and London, and for a while that of York also. Northumberland next passed for a short time under the direction of Keltic prelates,—Scots as they were then called,—who held no communion with the Romish missionaries. Felix, a Burgundian, but not an Arian, evangelized Eastanglia; Birinus, a Frank, carried the faith to Wessex. But as these men gradually left the scene of their labours, which must have been much increased by the difficulty of teaching populations who spoke a strange language, by means of interpreters, their Saxon pupils addressed themselves to the work with exemplary zeal and earnestness; it was very soon found that the island could supply itself with prelates fully equal to all the duties of their position; and to a mere accident was the English church indebted at the end of the seventh century for a foreign metropolitan, in the person of Theodore of Tarsus. Although we may reasonably suppose the traditions of the heathen priesthood not to have been without some weight, we must not conclude that these alone will account for the number of noble Anglosaxons whom, from the earliest period, we find devoting themselves to the service of the church, and clothed with its highest dignities. It must be admitted that nowhere else did Christianity make a deeper or more lasting impression than in England. Not only do we see the high nobles and the near relatives of kings among the bishops and archbishops, but kings themselves—warlike and fortunate kings—suddenly and voluntarily renouncing their temporal advantages, retiring into monasteries, and abdicating their crowns, that they may wander as pilgrims to the shrines of the Apostles in Rome. We find princesses and other high-born ladies devoting themselves to a life of celibacy, or separating from their husbands to preside over congregations of nuns: well descended men cannot rest till they have wandered forth to carry the tidings of redemption into distant and barbarous lands; a life of abstinence and hardship, to be crowned by a martyr’s death, seems to have been hungered and thirsted after by the wealthy and the noble,—assuredly an extraordinary and an edifying spectacle among a race not at all adverse to the pomps and pleasures of worldly life, a spectacle which compels us to believe in the deep, earnest, conscientious spirit of self-sacrifice and love of truth which characterized the nation.