names of
the gods of Germany and the North appear; the kings trace their
descent directly from them as their immediate ancestors; the Sagas and
poems about them symbolise those battles with the elements, the
storm, the sea, and the powers of nature, which are peculiarly
characteristic of the Northern mythology. With this, however, arose
the question, so important for the history of the world, whether the
great territory already won for the ideas of the universal culture and
religion of mankind should be again lost.

Towards the end of the 6th century the epoch began in which, as the
German invaders of Gaul had already done, so now those of Spain and
Italy, whether Arians or heathens, came over to the Catholic faith of
the Provincials. This took place under the mediation of the chief
Pontiff, who had raised the city, from which the Empire took its name,
to be the metropolis of the Faith. Lombards and Visigoths became as
good Catholics as the Franks already were. The relationship of the
royal families, which held all Germans in close connexion, and the
zeal of Rome, which could not possibly suffer the loss of a province
that it had once possessed, now combined to call forth a similar
movement among the Anglo-Saxons, yet one which worked itself out in a
very different way. Since among the natives a peculiar form of
church-life, not unconnected with the Druidic discipline, had arisen,
with which Rome would hold no communion, and which rejected all
demands of submission, the spiritual enmity of the missionary was
united to the national enmity of the conqueror. When a king still
heathen, while attacking the Britons, directed his weapons against the
monks of Bangor, who (collected on a height) were offering up prayers
against him, and massacred them to the number of twelve hundred, the
followers of the Roman Mission saw in this a punishment decreed by God
for apostasy, and the fulfilment of the prophecies of their
apostle.[5] On the other hand British Christian kings also made common
cause with the heathen Angles, and wasted with fire and sword the
provinces that had been converted by Rome. Had not in the vicissitudes
of internal war the native church organisation of the North won
influence over the Anglo-Saxons, heathenism would never have been
conquered; it would have always found support among the Britons.

When this however had once taken place, the whole Anglo-Saxon name
attached itself to the Roman ritual. Among the mo