but the
chief human affections, things far deeper than the passions, are yet
more abundantly illustrated by them.[23] It was a time when those
affections were not frozen by conventionalities and forced to conceal
themselves until they forgot to exist. In the narrative of Bede we find
also invaluable illustrations of a higher but not less real range of
human affections, viz. the affections of 'Christianised Humanity,'
affections grounded on divine truths and heavenly hopes, and yet in
entire harmony with affections of a merely human order, which lie
beneath them in a parallel plane. Occasionally the two classes enter
into conflict, as in the case of the monks of Bardeney who found it so
difficult to reconcile their reverence for a Saint with their patriotic
hatred of a foreign invader; but almost invariably the earthly and the
heavenly emotions are mutually supplemental, as in those tender
friendships of monk with monk, of king and bishop, grounded upon
religious sympathy and co-operation; so that the lower sentiment without
the higher would present, compared with the pictures now bequeathed to
us, but an unfinished and truncated image of Humanity. Here, again, the
semi-barbaric age described by Bede rendered the delineation more vivid.
In ages of effeminate civilisation the Christian emotions, even more
than those inherent in unassisted human nature, lose that ardour which
belongs to them when in a healthy condition--an ardour which especially
reveals itself during that great crisis, a nation's conversion, when,
beside a throng of new feelings and new hopes, a host of new Truths has
descended upon the intelligence of a whole people, and when a sense of
new knowledge and endless progress is thus communicated to it, far
exceeding that which is the boast of nations devoted chiefly to physical
science. The sense of progress, indeed, when such a period reaches its
highest, is a rapture. It is as though the motion of the planet which
carries us through space, a motion of which we are cognisant but which
we yet cannot feel, could suddenly become, like the speed of a
racehorse, a thing brought home to our consciousness.

Such ardours are scarcely imaginable in the later ages of a nation; but
in Bede's day a people accepting the 'glad tidings' was glad; and,
unambitious as his style is of the ornamental or the figurative, it is
brightened by that which it so faithfully describes. His chronicle is
often poetry, little as he inten