Page:The Church of England, its catholicity and continuity.djvu/29

 From the Mission in Ireland, then, you can see that the British Church in England had not finished its work at the time that the Saxons came. It is also due indirectly to the Celtic Church that the Gospel was taken to Scotland. It was due to the North of Ireland that the Gospel was carried into Scotland. S. Columba—a different man, remember, from S. Columban—visited Scotland with the object of planting the Gospel there. The king of that time presented him with the island of Hy or Iona for a home, and there Columba founded a Monastery, and it became a seat of learning. It was from this island that Christian priests were sent, many years later on, to re-kindle the dying embers of the Christian faith in Northumbria.

But to return to England again.

We see that it is now, in the fifth and sixth centuries, possessed by the Saxons. The Saxons were heathens. The old Celtic Church was confined to very narrow limits - the old North of Wales and Cornwall. All the rest of England was pagan. How did Christianity come back to England again?

It is now our pleasure to begin a brighter and more interesting story.

We have to go back to Rome, to a scene which took place in the slave market. It is due entirely to the goodness and pertinacity of Gregory the Great, after he became the Bishop of Rome, that Christianity was brought to our land again. He sent a Christian Mission to England, the Roman Mission it has been called. You must not think that Gregory was a Pope after the mediæval type of Popes. The Christianity of Gregory and his times was quite a different thing from the elaborate Papal system which swayed the world at the time