its first beginnings--shall I say,
from that great battle of the Winwaed, where three Kings are in
conflict and the slayer of two lies dead--steadily growing, on to the
present hour, as in politics so in religion, the effort sometimes
conscious, sometimes unconscious, but persistent, continuous, towards
an ever purer, higher, nobler conception of man's relations to the
Divine. From this effort arises the Reformation, from this effort
arises in the way of a thousand years the Empire based on the higher
justice, the imaginative justice, the higher freedom, the imaginative
freedom.

Thus even in the earliest periods of our history, during the struggle
between Christianism and the religion of Thor and Woden, England shows
far more violence, more earnestness, more fury on both sides, than is
found anywhere else in Europe. Glance, for instance, at this struggle
in Germany. Witikind[1] the Saxon arises as the champion of the old
gods against Christianity. Charlemagne with his Frankish cavalry comes
down amongst the Saxons. His march surpasses the march of Caesar, or
of Constantine against Rome. Witikind does rise to the heights of
heroism against Charlemagne twice; but in the end he surrenders, gives
in, and dies a hanger-on at the court of his conqueror. Mercia, the
kingdom of the mid-English, that too produces its champion of the old
gods against the religion of Christ--Penda. There is no surrender
here; two kings, I repeat, he slays, and grown old in war, he rouses
himself like a hoary old lion of the forest to fight his last battle.
An _intransigeant_, an irreconcilable, this King Penda, fighting his
last battle against this new and hated thing, this Christianism! He
lies dead there--he becomes no hanger-on. There you have the spirit of
the race. It displays itself in a form not less impressive in the
well-known incident in the very era of Penda, described by Bede.

King Eadwine sits in council to discuss the message of Christ, the
mansions that await the soul of man, the promise of a life beyond
death; and Coifi, one of the councillors, rising, speaks thus: "So
seemeth to me the life of man, O King, as when in winter-tide, seated
with your thanes around you, out of the storm that rages without a
sparrow flies into the hall, and fluttering hither and thither a
little, in the warmth and light, passes out again into the storm and
darkness. Such is man's life, but whence it cometh and whither it
goeth we know no