of the order and the rites of the Church, Magus. But bitter and personal as was the according to the usages of the Columban feeling upon this knotty point, the attention brotherhood, it dawned upon him that there of the Conference was concentrated upon was an older centre of ecclesiastical authority the more urgent difficulty of the Easter celethan Iona, and that, in some respects, the bration, and it seems to have been undertraditions of Rome differed from those which stood that the decision upon it would rule Columba had brought with him from Ireland that upon any other matter in dispute. to his island sanctuary. He quitted Lindisfarne and made his way to the eternal city, where he acquired a full knowledge of the usages from which the Celtic Church diverged, obtained the blessing of the Pope, and returned to England, bearing in the Roman tonsure, which he had adopted, the visible badge of his conviction of the just supremacy of the Papal See. Alchfrid, son of Oswy, had, in the year 658, been associated with his father in the government of his kingdom. On hearing of Wilfrid's return from abroad, he sent for him. Alchfrid's father, Oswy, had been instructed by the Scottish monks; but his mother, Eanfleda, daughter of Edwin, had been trained by Paulinus the Roman, and the young prince, as was to be expected, was more inclined to the religious observances and beliefs of his mother than to those of his sire. He lent a willing ear to Wilfrid's teaching, and turning the Celtic monks out of the monastery which he had founded at Ripon, he installed his tutor in their room. In this place of power, Wilfrid began openly and eagerly to urge the rules of Rome and to preach the duty of Catholic uniformity. The conflict between Rome and Iona, Ripon and Lindisfarne, soon became general and violent, and at last, at the summons of King Oswy, the representatives of the two great parties came to Whitby to fight it out. The question of the tonsure was not mooted, though it had stirred keen enough feeling. The tonsure had originated with the first cenobites of the East, who had shaved their heads in token, according to Oriental custom, of humiliation and affliction. When monasticism spread, and monks came to fill the highest offices in the Church, the practice of shaving the head continued, though its origin was lost sight of; and as clerical garb and usage acquired individuality, the tonsure became one of the marks of the sacerdotal order. But the Oriental "clean shave" was not observed in the West. The priests of Rome shaved only the crown of the head; those of the Celtic Church shaved the forehead in a wide circle from ear to ear. The Romans said their practice came down to them from Simon Peter, and that the practice of the Celts had come down from Simon The early Eastern Christians used to celebrate Easter on the day of the Hebrew Passover, which was held on the fourteenth of the first Jewish month. The Western Churches celebrated it on the Sunday following the day of the Passover. The Council of Nice decided in favour of this usage; and those who, in spite of the decision, still adhered to the fourteenth were considered heretical, and went by the name of " Quartodecimans," or Fourteenthers. It was not upon this point, however, that the dispute at Whitby turned. The Celts were not Quartodecimans. They simply were, like the Russians at the present day, wedded to the "Old Style," and prejudiced against the New. The New Style had been adopted by the Roman Church about the middle of the sixth century, at a time when the Christians of Britain were almost wholly cut off, through their local and domestic troubles, from intercourse with the Churches of the Continent. Isolated communities, whether ecclesiastical or social, become bound to their own forms and traditions; and when that intercourse began to be renewed, the Celts were not disposed to give in to what they considered a Roman novelty. It had been determined by the Council of Nice that the astronomers of Alexandria should make the necessary computation for fixing the date on which, in each year, the Easter festival should occur, and should intimate the result to the Roman pontiff, who, in turn, should notify it to the remoter Churches. This plan, however, did not work well. The Romans questioned the accuracy of the Egyptian calculations, and frequently departed from them; and it was not until after nearly two hundred years of divergency and dispute that the uniform method of reckoning was adopted which is still in force, and which restricts the paschal celebration to the interval between the 22nd of March and the 25th of April. To this method the Celts did not conform; and as a consequence their Easter, from time to time, fell on another day than that on which the Roman churches were celebrating it. A variety in practice is often felt to be more intolerable than a divergence in doctrine, and King Oswy, no doubt, was irritated and annoyed when, in the midst of the festivity and gladness of his Celtic Easter, he saw his queen, with all her court, still practising the fasts and austerities of her Roman Lent. Personal feeling, family unity, social order, as well as religious prejudice, were involved in this Easter question, which was now to be decided. admonitions as readily as they are known to King Oswy presided in the conference. In those days there were no troublesome theories of Church and State. The Church strove to imbue the whole people with Christian faith and order, and accepted, without scruple, whatever help in this work "the secular arm" could bring. So King Oswy "took the chair," as of right, and called on his bishop, Colman, to open the debate. Cedd, bishop of the East Saxons, was to act as interpreter for the Celts, who did not understand Latin or the Anglo-Saxon tongue; and Wilfrid was to speak on behalf of the Anglo-Saxons, as Bishop Agilbert possessed their language but indifferently, having, indeed, lost his diocese of Wessex because King Cenwalch, to whom he preached, could not understand his Latin, and the bishop could not deliver a sermon in Saxon. "We "We all," said Oswy, "serve one God, and should observe one rule of life; and as we all expect one kingdom of heaven, we ought not to differ in the celebration of the Divine mysteries, but rather to inquire which is the truest tradition, that we all may follow it." The debate then proceeded between Colman and Wilfrid; the one founding his argument on the personal usage of his predecessors, and the peculiar tradition of the Celtic Church, derived, as he maintained, from St. John; the other on the Catholic practice of all other The Celtic Easter was doomed. On this churches, and the authority of St. Peter, the quaint notion of King Oswy's, suggested by prince of the apostles, and of St. Paul, the the most unspiritual interpretation of our Apostle of the Gentiles. The argument was Lord's language, hinged the future of the not on either side very logical or cogent; British Church. The great wave of Celtic but on Colman's it scarcely moved from the influence, which, rolling down from Iona to austere and tenacious assertion of the obliga- Lindisfarne, and swelled by another current tion of the example of St. John and the holy spreading outward from Bangor on the Dee, abbot Columba. In the true spirit of eccle- had well-nigh submerged all England, was siastical conservatism and Celtic clansman- stemmed at Whitby. It was long ere it ship, his key-note was, "We cannot change wholly receded; but the retrocession began the customs of our fathers." "Can we admit," | here. Cedd conformed to the Roman order, he demanded, "that our most venerable father Columba and his successors, men beloved of God, have acted contrary to the Divine word?" "Beloved of God, I doubt not," replied Wilfrid," and serving Him in their rustic simplicity, with pious hearts; and because knowing no better, sinning not in keeping Easter on a wrong day. But as little do I doubt that if a Catholic calculator had come to them, they would have followed his and returned to his bishopric at London; but Colman, true to the traditions of Columba, and too proud to change, quitted Lindisfarne for ever, and taking with him the bones of Aidan, went back disconsolate and defeated to Iona. With him the Celtic independence and individuality, that had broadly stamped the religion of England with its own character, retired towards the North, henceforth destined to recede ever farther and farther before the Anglo-Roman advance, until every vestige of the early Scottish peculiarities had vanished and the Culdees had become but a memory and a name. and more sovereign influence on the destinies of his race.” That Wilfrid's work deserves our grateful memory is undeniable. Great as were the later corruptions of the Church of Rome, and injurious as were the tendencies of the Papal dominion, the union of the mediæval Anglo-Saxon Church with Rome aided the development of the national character and power of England, as the predominance of the Celtic Church, with its tribal peculiarities, its narrowness, and intensity, its lack of central authority and unifying influence, could never have done. Among the forces that have moulded Anglo-Saxon life and character, St. Wilfrid claims a foremost place. The ruins of the Norman Abbey, which occupy the site of Hilda's monastery, and crown the cliff above the gay and busy town of Whitby, form one of the most note While Colman shrank away into obscurity, Wilfrid withdrew from the conference to enter on a conspicuous but stormy career of forty years, in which he was to be the champion of the Papal See, and through many apostolic labours, ecclesiastical strifes, civil discords, and personal vicissitudes, to extend and consolidate the Anglo-Saxon Church, under the broad uniformity and discipline of Rome. "England owed it to him," says Montalembert in the noble eulogy he has pronounced on one whom he evidently held in highest honour among his heroes of the Church, "that she was not only Christian, but Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman. No other Anglo-Saxon exercised a more decisive | worthy landmarks in the history of England. R. H. STORY. WAR. A Sermon by the Right Rev. the Lord Bishop of Rochester. "And he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one."-LUKE xxii. 36. THE air has been thick with war. For months past there have come across the Alps to our quiet island the confused noise of the warrior, and the sharp battle cry, and the dull moan of the wounded, and the voice of Rachel weeping for her children. One day the sky clears, only for it to be overcast the next. Hope strangely oscillates with fear. The wisest man is he who predicts nothing. Worst of all, a slow match has all this time been burning in Europe, and any day an explosion may shake the air, and set half the world in flames. We hope, but that is, as yet, all. And this being an age when nations make war as well as princes, when even for their own interests it behoves those who are as yet but bystanders and spectators in a great conflict to meditate on the ways of God with men, and to see that He is always a God who judgeth the earth, be the people never so unquiet, it cannot be quite inopportune for a minister of the gospel of peace to offer to his brethren some reflections on a subject that comes right home to every thoughtful and patriotic heart, to try to find a reply to some of the blunt questions, impatiently, nay, sometimes bitterly asked, as to why the world has war at all. Which questions chiefly resolve themselves into these two: How is it that Christianity has failed in preventing war? How is it that the Church is so often silent about it—when she speaks, speaks wrong? For surely (men reason) if there is one thing more than another that the Prince of Peace might have been expected to do, it is that of making war to cease throughout the world, of breaking the bow and burning the chariot in the fire. If there is one thing more than another that He pressed on men's consciences till they were weary of hearing it, it was, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." And yet in the end of the days, so far from wars being fewer or smaller, our own corner of this redeemed earth is steadily becoming a sort of armed camp; and the man who can invent a new gun or war-ship is decorated and rewarded, just as if he had discovered a new remedy for some incurable disease or had made life easier for the poor. As for the Church (men go on to say), her silence might be thought but a coward's baseness, if it was only silence; but it is too often her voice that stirs the passion of war, her prayers that encourage men to presume |