il the reign of Olaf Trygovason (A.D.
993-A.D. 1000), who had been baptized in the Scilly Isles during a
piratical expedition. The labours of the English missionaries were
finally successful in the reign of Olaf the Holy (A.D. 1017-A.D. 1033),
who was earnest in his efforts to further the work of the Church. It
may be remarked that Norwegian Bishops were usually consecrated either
in England or France, {135} though all the Scandinavian Churches were
still professedly dependent on the Archbishopric of Hamburg.

[Sidenote: Conversion of Iceland,]

In Iceland some traces of early Christianity, probably the result of
the labours of Irish missionaries, were still remaining when it was
colonized by Norwegian settlers in the ninth century; and towards the
end of the tenth century successive attempts were made by a Saxon
Bishop and by missionaries from Norway, to revive and deepen these
impressions. The opposition of the heathen colonists was, however, of
so determined a character, that it was only by the gradual conversion
of the mother country, and the labours of new bands of missionaries,
chiefly English and Irish, that Paganism was by degrees overcome.

[Sidenote: Greenland,]

From Iceland the Church made its way to Greenland, another Norwegian
colony, which was converted mainly by the instrumentality of an
Icelandic missionary, in the first half of the eleventh century; but
this ancient Church died out in the fifteenth century. About the same
time Christianity spread through the Norwegians to the Orkney,
Shetland, and Faroe Islands.

[Sidenote: and Lapland.]

The Church was first planted amongst the Lapps by Swedish missionaries
in the thirteenth century, but it was not until the sixteenth and two
following centuries that Christianity became the religion of the
country.

Section 8. _The Churches now comprehended in European Turkey and
Greece._

We look in vain in the history of the Church in Eastern Europe for the
missionary activity which {136} bears so prominent a place in the
annals of Western Christendom. [Sidenote: Lack of missionary zeal in
the East.] The minds of Eastern Christians were still much occupied by
continued contests between the Catholic Faith and developments of
already condemned heresies, and to these succeeded the scarcely less
absorbing controversy about Image-breaking. Nor was there in the East
the same pressing contact with Paganism, which made it in the West a
political necessit