Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/431

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in the first days of the Conquest; as a stranger, though only as a stranger, he would have been out of place in the days of our earlier freedom. When he did come, he was thoroughly in place, as one who was before all things a preacher of righteousness, but who could, when need called for it, put on the mantle of the statesman and even that of the warrior. Like our own Wulfstan, in many things his fellow, we find him the friend and counsellor of men of a character most opposite to his own. And, as we have seen Wulfstan, if not commanding, at least directing, armies, so we shall see Anselm, if not waging war in his own person, at least hallowing more than one camp by his presence. And we can hardly blame him if, at some later stages of his career, he allowed himself to be swayed by scruples which he had never thought of at its beginning, if, in his zeal for eternal right, he allowed himself to sin against the ancient laws and customs of England. When England, Normandy, France, and the Empire, were as they all were in his day, we can forgive him for looking on the Roman Bishop as the one surviving embodiment of law and right, and for deeming that, when he spake, it was as when a man listened to the oracles of God.

The tale of the early life of Anselm has been handed down to us by a loving companion, a man of our own nation, who was won in his youth by the kind words of the foreign saint when he came to England as a momentary visitor, and who in after times became the most faithful of disciples through all the changes of his fortunes. It is one of the marked features of the story that we know so little of Anselm, except from his own writings and from the narrative of Eadmer. Our own historians of the time