's wrath'] are they to be freed?"
answered Gregory. "How call ye the king of that country?" "AElla."
"Then Alleluia surely ought to be sung in his kingdom to the praise
of that God who created all things," said the gracious and clever
monk.

"The conversion of the English to Christianity," says Freeman, "at
once altered their whole position in the world. Hitherto our
history had been almost wholly insular; our heathen forefathers had
had but little to do, either in war or peace, with any nations
beyond their own four seas. We hear little of any connection being
kept up between the Angles and Saxons who settled in Britain, and
their kinsfolk who abode in their original country. By its
conversion England was first brought, not only within the pale of
the Christian Church, but within the pale of the general political
society of Europe. But our insular position, combined with the
events of our earlier history, was not without its effect on the
peculiar character of Christianity as established in England.
England was the first great territorial conquest of the spiritual
power, beyond the limits of the Roman Empire, beyond the influence
of Greek and Roman civilization."

The following account from the _Ecclesiastical History_ of the
Venerable Bede, the "father of English history," and foremost
scholar of England in his age, is in the modern English rendering
by Thomson, of King Alfred's famous translation, made for the
instruction of the English people as the best work of that period
on their own history.

As a contrast John Richard Green's treatment of the same episode is
appended.

THE VENERABLE BEDE

When according to forthrunning time [it] was about five hundred and
ninety-two years from Christ's hithercoming, Mauricius, the Emperor,
took to the government, and had it two-and-twenty years. He was the
fifty-fourth from Augustus. In the tenth year of that Emperor's reign,
Gregory, the holy man, who was in lore and deed the highest, took to the
bishophood of the Roman Church, and of the apostolic seat, and held and
governed it thirteen years and six months and ten days. In the
fourteenth year of the same Emperor, about a hundred and fifty years
from the English nation's hithercoming into Britain, he was admonished
by a divine impulse that he should send God's servant Augustine, and