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870.-Great victories for the Danes in East Anglia.

871.- Battle of Ashdown. Nine battles fought in the south of England.

872.- The Danes wintered in London.

873.-The Danes wintered in Lindsey (Lincolnshire).

874.-The Danes wintered in Repton, and overran the whole of Mercia.

875.-Alfred's first fleet engaged the enemy. 876.- Fighting at Wareham.

877.-The Danes at Exeter.

878.-Fighting in Wessex. Alfred at Athelney. 880.-The Danes settled in East Anglia. 883.-Alfred obtained possession of London. 885.-Fighting at Rochester and off the mouth of the Stour.

886.-Alfred repaired London.
893-895.-Long and stubborn fighting.
896.-Capture of the Danish ships.
897.-Alfred's fleet.
898-901.-Peace.

CHAPTER IV

ALFRED AND RELIGION

THE dominant aims of Alfred as a king might be arranged in the following order. First, security from the Dane, throughout his reign the only enemy of Wessex. For this purpose everything must be sacrificed; security was necessary for all that might follow. Next, in

all societies of men there is one common basis : the society must be fed. For this purpose there must be security of cultivation; the farm and the farmer must be protected; the people must be fed. The third aim was the cohesion of all the people one with another; without the power of acting together, and the instinct of acting together as if nothing else was possible, there was no stability of order and security: the country would fall back to its former condition of separate tribal communities, in which there might be courage but no strength. This necessity involved the administration of justice with an equal hand, ruthless as regards the individual, but beneficent to the community.

Security being provided for as far as was possible, justice and the sense of justice being recognized, so that there would be no oppressions of one class by another, and the sense of community might be developed and strengthened, the next point of importance was that of religion. And first it must be the religion. which ruled the whole of Western Europe. I do not suppose there was ever any question in Alfred's mind as to the truth of the dogmas in which he was educated; the time was not yet arrived for these dogmas to be questioned by him or his people. Apart, however, from the doctrine, it was essential for a country which sought advancement in civilization to belong to the great family Italian, Spanish, French, German, with all that their modern names signify of Latin Christianity. The common faith was a bond which seems, indeed, to have

held the nations together loosely enough, yet had more strength than we are perhaps ready to acknowledge; it was a form of faith imposed upon the nations by the ecclesiastics, who rested their claims on the inspiration of councils and the authority of the pope. So long as there was one supreme head of the Church acknowledged by all alike, there would be the same doctrine common to all; the same doctrine, the same services, the same priesthood, the same ritual. The pilgrim on his way to the Holy Land was with his own spiritual kin so long as he found himself within the authority of the pope; every church was a copy of the churches he had left behind; the Mass sung in Venice was the same as that sung at Westminster. There were the same words, the same ceremonies, the same vestments, the same priests, to outward seeming. Of course, when the pilgrim was on the Byzantine side of Europe he was among strangers who marked differences of creed, unintelligible to the people, by differences of rites which they could understand. It was of the highest importance, indeed, that there should be a common creed and a common ritual. We have only to remember the wonderful heresies into which ignorant people fall whenever they reason out for themselves (being wholly without history, without learning, without power of formulating reason, or arriving at conclusions), to understand the Christian anarchy that would certainly have followed on premature separation from Rome. One man called himself the Christ, another

preached vicarious flagellation for the sins of the people, another advocated free love, another created a new sect by a new statement of the Incomprehensible. There was no end to the fancies and the visions which were accepted as realities and served as foundations to new forms of faith. The modern example of Protestant nations shows also like absurdities into which persons of fair education may fall even at the present day. When, in a time when some education is within the reach of all, we find such forms of faith as the Jezreelites, the Perfectionists, the Oneida Community, with the narrow tenets of Baptists, Seventh Day Sabbatarians, Primitive Methodists, Plymouth Brethren; when we read about the early Quakers, the Fifth Monarchy Men, the believers in Joanna Southcott and Muggleton, the Mormons, the Spiritualists, who never tire of getting messages without a single word of sense or help from the dead; the horde of cranks, visionaries, and frauds; nay, the ecclesiastical madness which would destroy a venerable Church for the sake of making a smell in a church; when, I say, we consider these things, we cannot overrate the wisdom of those who kept the Christian Church together with one form of faith, one ritual, under one supreme head. In this way, and only in this way, would the people of Wessex be united with the family of nations which were slowly but surely advancing in civilization.

The religion, therefore, which Alfred encouraged was that whose earthly head was the Pope of Rome. The Teutonic mind is naturally

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inclined to religion. Alfred had, therefore, a receptive material, capable of receiving impressions and of retaining them. Meantime a strange thing had happened. During the time of the Danish success, the Christian religion had been not only trampled upon but exterminated. Perhaps it seems incredible that in a few short years so much should have been destroyed and forgotten. We have, however, to consider a time of great ignorance. Among the common people there was nothing left to keep alive their faith. Every church, every religious house had been destroyed. Perhaps priests and deacons, monks and nuns, scholars and divines, had all been murdered, scattered, or driven across the seas. To the faithful it seemed, when the monks gathered up the relics, as if their saints were carried away from them. The schools were broken up; the monastic libraries were burned with the houses which contained them. The boys of the thanes grew up without the least tincture of learning or book-lore, the boys of the common folk without the instruction of the parish priest. Yet, it may be objected, the memory of the religion would survive. Is that so certain? Consider the following case: In March of 1901 there appeared in the papers the copy of a report by a French colonel. For many years he had been examining the conscripts, asking them, among other things, what they knew of the war of 1870. They knew nothing-none of them knew anything; one or two thought that Bismarck was the German Emperor; one or two had a hazy notion that there had been

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