nd, Augustine, landed--if Bede may
be trusted for a topographical detail of this character--on the island
of Ebbsfleet, where Hengist and Horsa had previously found a haven
for their vessels. This is now part of the corner of Kent, called
Thanet, and is an island no longer. There Ethelbert, in that generous
and broad-minded speech, familiar to all students of English history,
while expressing himself as content with the gods of his forefathers
(these included Thor, Woden, Freya, and the rest), yet would place no
obstacles in the way of these missionaries of new and strange ideas.
He even provided them with quarters in Canterbury, and in the old
church of St. Martin outside the city, where Queen Bertha had been in
the habit of worshipping with her chaplain, Augustine and his monks
began to preach and instruct all who cared to listen. It seems
unlikely that the influence of the queen and her good chaplain should
have been entirely without results, and it is quite possible that
Augustine found the ground prepared for the seed he diligently began
to sow. Bishop Luidhard, whose name should always be linked with that
of St. Augustine, appears to have died soon after the arrival of Pope
Gregory's mission, and his remains were eventually placed in a golden
chest in the church of Saints Peter and Paul, afterwards St.
Augustine's.

The zeal and enthusiasm of the band of missionaries began to bring in
many converts. Ethelbert himself consented to be baptized on June 2 in
the year of Augustine's landing, and the Saxons soon began to embrace
the new faith in thousands, so that in a very few years the
Christianizing of England had made such progress that Canterbury
became the headquarters of the Christian Church in England, a position
it has held without interruption ever since--a period of over 1,300
years. It took England nearly nine centuries to make up its mind to
rid itself of the stultifying authority of the Bishop of Rome and to
shake itself free from monasticism and the various forms of idolatrous
worship which grew up in the sultry atmosphere of the Papal Church;
but these great changes have been evolved, and still the ancient city
of Canterbury, hallowed with so many memories of saintly lives,
continues to be the metropolis of the Established Church of England.
And the imminence of further change carries with it no danger of any
break in this long association of Canterbury with ecclesiastical
control, for if in the slow gr