thern wall, to guard the Saxon shore. The Roman troops had gone, and
with them the flower of the British youth[31]. From north and east the
barbarians poured in upon the Britons, pell mell. Gildas, crying bitter
tears, and using bitter ink, in his Welsh monastery, tells us of the
weakness and the follies of the British and their kings, of the cruelties
of the barbarous folk. We see in his pages the smoke of burned churches,
the blood of murdered Christians. Matthew of Westminster tells us that the
churches that were burned had the happier fate. In thirty cases churches
were saved and made into heathen temples, the altars polluted with pagan
sacrifice. But the Saxons and Angles made way so slowly that it is
certain they met with a much sturdier opposition than Gildas credits his
countrymen with. Strive as they would, however, and did, the Britons
gradually gave way. Thus, and thus only, can we fill the dreary void in
British history, which we know as the first hundred and fifty years of the
Making of England.

This brings us very near to the end of our period. Not of our subject; for
in my concluding lecture I have to deal--with sad scantness--with the
Christian Church in other parts of these islands, before and at the coming
of Augustine.

In the twenty years immediately preceding the arrival of Augustine, the
long line of British Bishops of London came to an end. It has been a
subject of remark, and of moralising, that Theonus, the last bishop, lost
heart and fled just when the chance was coming for which it is presumed
that he had been waiting, the actual beginning of the conversion of the
English. But remarks of this character are misplaced; they disregard--or
are ignorant of--the political facts of the time. Theonus of London was a
British bishop in a British city. London had not fallen. Most difficult of
access in the then state of land and water, of marsh and mud, whether
from north or south or east or west, it held out to the last. The earliest
date that can be assigned to its fall is about the year 568, a