to, the general type of faith prevailing in our own generation. Nobody
could be persuaded now that a dead head could speak, or a wolf change
his nature to protect it; but thousands will credit a fortune-teller,
or believe that a mesmerized patient can have a mental perception of
scenes and occurrences a thousand miles away.

There was a great deal of superstition in the days when Alfred was
called to the throne, and there was also, with it, a great deal of
genuine honest piety. The piety and the superstition, too, were
inextricably intermingled and combined together. They were all
Catholics then, yielding an implicit obedience to the Church of Rome,
making regular contributions in money to sustain the papal authority,
and looking to Rome as the great and central point of Christian
influence and power, and the object of supreme veneration. We have
already seen that the Saxons had established a seminary at Rome, which
King Ethelwolf, Alfred's father, rebuilt and re-endowed. One of the
former Anglo-Saxon kings, too, had given a grant of one penny from
every house in the kingdom to the successors of St. Peter at Rome,
which tax, though nominally small, produced a very considerable sum
in the aggregate, exceeding for many years the royal revenues of the
kings of England. It continued to be paid down to the time of Henry
VIII., when the reformation swept away that, and all the other
national obligations of England to the Catholic Church together.

In the age of Alfred, however, there were not only these public acts
of acknowledgment recognizing the papal supremacy, but there was
a strong tide of personal and private feeling of veneration and
attachment to the mother Church, of which it is hard for us, in the
present divided state of Christendom, to conceive. The religious
thoughts and affections of every pious heart throughout the realm
centered in Rome. Rome, too, was the scene of many miracles, by which
the imaginations of the superstitious and of the truly devout were
excited, which impressed them with an idea of power in which they felt
a sort of confiding sense of protection. This power was continually
interposing, now in one way and now in another, to protect virtue, to
punish crime, and to testify to the impious and to the devout, to each
in an appropriate way, that their respective deeds were the objects,
according to their character, of the displeasure or of the approbation
of Heaven.

On one occasion, the followi