ority wielded by hereditary chieftains, the dissociation of
piety from morality, the absence of those larger and more humanizing
influences which contact with a wider world alone can give, this is a
picture which the Irish Church of later times presents to us. It was from
such a chaos as this that England was saved by the victory of Rome in the
Synod of Whitby. But the success of Wilfrid dispelled a yet greater
danger. Had England clung to the Irish Church it must have remained
spiritually isolated from the bulk of the Western world. Fallen as Rome
might be from its older greatness, it preserved the traditions of
civilization, of letters and art and law. Its faith still served as a
bond which held together the nations that sprang from the wreck of the
Empire. To fight against Rome was, as Wilfrid said, "to fight against the
world." To repulse Rome was to condemn England to isolation. Dimly as
such thoughts may have presented themselves to Oswiu's mind, it was the
instinct of a statesman that led him to set aside the love and gratitude
of his youth and to link England to Rome in the Synod of Whitby.

[Sidenote: Theodore]

Oswiu's assent to the vigorous measures of organization undertaken by a
Greek monk, Theodore of Tarsus, whom Rome despatched in 668 to secure
England to her sway as Archbishop of Canterbury, marked a yet more
decisive step in the new policy. The work of Theodore lay mainly in the
organization of the episcopate, and thus the Church of England, as we
know it to-day, is the work, so far as its outer form is concerned, of
Theodore. His work was determined in its main outlines by the previous
history of the English people. The conquest of the Continent had been
wrought either by races which were already Christian, or by heathens who
bowed to the Christian faith of the nations they conquered. To this
oneness of religion between the German invaders of the Empire and their
Roman subjects was owing the preservation of all that survived of the
Roman world. The Church everywhere remained untouched. The Christian
bishop became the defender of the conquered Italian or Gaul against his
Gothic and Lombard conqueror, the mediator between the German and his
subjects, the one bulwark against barbaric violence and oppression. To
the barbarian, on the other hand, he was the representative of all that
was venerable in the past, the living record of law, of letters, and of
art. But in Britain the priesthood and the people ha