hester, I suppose, or possibly
at Bramber--and asked him why the people were going on in this fashion,
who said to him: "It is because of the famine."

St. Wilfrid, shrugging his shoulders, said: "Why do they not eat fish?"

"Because," said the King, "fish, swimming about in the water, are
almost impossible to catch. We have tried it in our hunger a hundred
times, but even when we had the good luck to grasp one of them, the
slippery thing would glide from our fingers."

St. Wilfrid then in some contempt said again:

"Why do you not make nets?"

And he explained the use of nets to the whole Court, preaching, as it
were, a sermon upon nets to them, and craftily introducing St. Peter and
that great net which they hang outside his tomb in Rome upon his feast
day--which is the 29th of June. The King and his Court made a net and
threw it into the sea, and brought out a great mass of fish. They were
so pleased that they told St. Wilfrid they would do anything he asked.
He baptised them and they made him their first bishop; and he took up
his residence in Selsey, and since then the people of Sussex have gone
steadily forward, increasing in every good thing, until they are now by
far the first and most noble of all the people in the world.

There is I know not what in history, or in the way in which it is
taught, which makes people imagine that it is something separate from
the life they are living, and because of this modern error, you may very
well be wondering what on earth this true story of the foundation of our
country has to do with the Looe Stream. It has everything to do with it.
The sea, being governed by a pagan god, made war at once, and began
eating up all those fields which had specially been consecrated to the
Church, civilisation, common sense, and human happiness. It is still
doing so, and I know an old man who can remember a forty-acre field all
along by Clymping having been eaten up by the sea; and out along past
Rustington there is, about a quarter of a mile from the shore, a rock,
called the Church Rock, the remains of a church which quite a little
time ago people used for all the ordinary purposes of a church.

The sea then began to eat up Selsey. Before the Conquest--though I
cannot remember exactly when--the whole town had gone, and they had to
remove the cathedral to Chichester. In Henry VIII's time there was still
a park left out of the old estates, a park with trees in it; but this
also the sea