ecclesiastical unity as
a branch of the Church of Rome. Thus unity in the Church preceded by
several centuries unity in the State.

[Illustration: QUEEN BERTHA.]

In connection with Augustine's mission to England, a memorable story
(recorded in Green's "History of the English People") tells how, when
but a young Roman deacon, Gregory had noted the white bodies, the fair
faces, the golden hair of some youths who stood bound in the
market-place of Rome. "From what country do these slaves come?" he
asked the traders who brought them. "They are English, Angles!" the
slave-dealers answered. The deacon's pity veiled itself in poetic
humour. "Not Angles, but Angels," he said, "with faces so angel-like!
From what country come they?" "They come," said the merchants, "from
Deira." "De ira!" was the untranslatable reply; "aye, plucked from
God's ire, and called to Christ's mercy! And what is the name of their
king?" "AElla," they told him, and Gregory seized on the words as of
good omen. "Alleluia shall be sung in AElla's land!" he cried, and
passed on, musing how the angel-faces should be brought to sing it.
Only three or four years had gone by when the deacon had become Bishop
of Rome, and the marriage of Bertha, daughter of the Frankish king,
Charibert of Paris, with AEthelberht, King of Kent, gave him the
opening he sought; for Bertha, like her Frankish kinsfolk, was a
Christian.

And so, after negotiations with the rulers of Gaul, Gregory sent
Augustine, at the head of a band of monks, to preach the gospel to the
English people. The missionaries landed in 597, on the very spot where
Hengest had landed more than a century before, in the Isle of Thanet;
and the king received them sitting in the open air on the chalk-down
above Minster, where the eye nowadays catches, miles away over the
marshes, the dim tower of Canterbury. Rowbotham, in his "History of
Music," says that wherever Gregory sent missionaries he also sent
copies of the Gregorian song as he had arranged it in his
"Antiphonary." And he bade them go singing among the people. And
Augustine entered Kent bearing a silver cross and a banner with the
image of Christ painted on it, while a long train of choristers walked
behind him chanting the _Kyrie Eleison_. In this way they came to the
court of AEthelberht, who assigned them Canterbury as an abode; and
they entered Canterbury with similar pomp, and as they passed through
the gates they sang this petition: "Lord, we