Page:The golden days of the early English church from the arrival of Theodore to the death of Bede, volume 1.djvu/20

x to correspond with each other and with the great ones of the earth about the concerns of heaven and the methods of getting there. Their interest in secular affairs was a secondary one, and if they diverged into a discussion of them it was generally in a very elementary fashion. Hence it is inevitable that we should know a great deal more about the early ecclesiastical history of England than we do about its civil history, and If we are to examine the latter profitably we must first plant our feet on the more solid basis which is buttressed by more adequate evidence. Having done so, we can use the vantage so gained for the purpose of exploring its complementary field where the mists hang heavier on the fields which we wish to explore.

This method Is particularly advantageous in our own country, where we, and we alone in all Europe, possess a work of the matchless worth of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, unequalled in Its time in style, picturesqueness, and extraordinary general accuracy, and presenting an historical and moral outlook of a very ideal kind. It is the one matchless literary work of art in the European literature of the first half of the eighth century a.d., and It forms a splendid scaffolding upon which to raise our building, and on which to hang the various illustrative decorations or additions which lesser lights have provided for us. This, then, explains the object and purpose with which, at the close of an exceptionally strenuous life and by the evergreen kindness of my old friend, Mr. Murray, I have