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The fact recorded may conceivably be correct, though the appeal to the king's writings is wrong. Whether the famous Irishman came to England or not, it is probable that Alfred gave hospitable entertainment to the teaching, the generous sympathies, and the ideas, so far as he understood them, of the first schoolmaster he had ever known. John's name may stand among the positive influences which made Alfred England's most literary king.

No account of Charles' court at this time would be complete without the figure of Archbishop Hincmar of Rheims, the statesman - ecclesiastic, who was ready to defend the nascent national Church, of which he was primate, from the encroachments and pretensions of the Pope. With the hand of a strong ruler he tried to suppress heresy as he would have suppressed rebellion. He was responsible for degrading and scourging the monk Gottschalk, who had defended the doctrine of predestination, then, as in later time, the creed of those who rebelled against ecclesiastical tyranny, and appealed from the Church to God. It was Hincmar who performed the wedding ceremony for Æthelwulf and Judith, and set the offending crown on Judith's head. So that Alfred had cause to remember the stately ecclesiastic who had helped to give him his youthful step-mother.

Amongst other new things which came to Alfred at

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Verberie, would be his first stories of the brave work of Christian missionaries amongst the wild northern Wiking settlements. Ethelwulf's stay at the court of Charles very nearly coincided with one of the visits to Germany of Anskar, the Apostle of the North. The tales of his adventures and his conquests among the men whose name was a terror to Europe would often be told with breathless interest: and would perhaps suggest to Alfred the hope that the wild worshippers of Thor might become servants of the Christ.

With such commanding and interesting personalities surrounding the emperor, Alfred could not fail to notice the deference paid to men whose influence came neither from birth nor power, but from sheer ability and character. One of the ministers of Charles, writing about the practice of the king and his court, records that "He refers the matter, as is customary, to the bishops and priests, so that in whatever way the divine authority may please to settle it according to His will, they may assent with a free and ready mind.” The account of the method may be accepted without insisting that the desired end was always secured. The existence and habitual use of such a consultative council of experts and administrators, rather than landowners and military leaders, is the significant fact. It is one of the evidences of the advance of civilisation and the repression of barbarism.

Chapter V

The Inward Man

"We find in him not merely noble actions, we find in him a life in the true meaning of the word, I mean we feel in him both development and struggle."-Sabatier, “St Francis of Assisi,” p. xvi.

"Fasting is . . . a voluntary abstinence prescribed to the soul by itself, from all that it feels, though lawful otherwise, would impair its fitness for the service of God. Experience shows that it is the men who have been superior to the attractions which life at the common level has for the average sensual man, who alone have been able to do the world spiritual service.”—James Denney.

THERE is one thing more important for the understanding of a man's life than the external circumstances of his up-bringing, that is, whatever throws light on the formation of what the mystics call the "inward man." The external features of destiny are made for us; the destiny of the inward man is determined by the man himself. To the majority of men, the formation of the inward man comes in the war of" sense and soul," that conflict with the animal nature in us which is waged to determine whether the body is to be the servant or the master of the mind. The struggle with a lion and a bear, which brought to the shepherd of Bethlehem the

first test and countersign of royal qualities, has its counterpart in the struggle with the "ape and tiger," which every man finds thrust upon him with his manhood. The struggle is specially severe with men to whom nature has given great force of character and abundant vitality. Sometimes the endowment is so great that, as in the case of Charlemagne and Peter the Great, a man is still a great figure although he cannot always rule himself. More often it is manifest that an original force of character is made finer in fibre and nobler in quality by the conflict for and achievement of self-mastery. It is so in Alfred's case, when the discipline is accentuated by a long experience in that other school of character, the conflict with physical infirmity and disease.

Asser, who alone gives us any account of the growth of the inward man, inserts his interesting account, in a way that would only have occurred to a monk, in the midst of the account of Alfred's wedding feast in 868. It is a long digression, in what he calls himself "preposterous order," and others might describe as hopeless disorder. Leaving the account of the wedding to come in its proper place, this is what Asser records of the period of Alfred's youth: "If I may be allowed to speak briefly of his zealous piety to God in the flower of his youth, before he entered the marriage state, he

wished to strengthen his mind in the observance of God's commandments, for he perceived that he' could with difficulty abstain from gratifying his carnal desires: and because he feared the anger of God if he should do anything contrary to His will, he used often to rise in the morning at the cock-crow, and go to pray in the churches and by the relics of the saints. There he prostrated himself on the ground, and prayed that God in His mercy would strengthen his mind still more in His service, by some infirmity such as he might bear, but not such as would render him imbecile and contemptible in his worldly duties; and when he had often prayed with much devotion to this effect, after an interval of some time Providence vouchsafed to afflict him with disease, which he bore long and painfully for many years, and even despaired of life, until he entirely got rid of it by his prayers.

"But once, divine Providence so ordered it that when he was on a visit to Cornwall for the sake of hunting, and had turned out of his road to pray in a certain chapel in which rests the body of St Guerir- - and now also St Neot rests there for King Alfred was always from his infancy a frequent visitor of holy places for the sake of prayer and almsgiving, he prostrated himself for private devotion, and after some time spent therein, he entreated of God's mercy that in His boundless

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