move
the barrier of heathendom which the English invaders had formed between
the Church universal and the Celtic and British church or churches. It
proved in the end that the undertaking was much beyond the powers of the
Italian missionaries; and then the earlier church stepped in from its
confines in the West and did the work. It was so that the great English
province of Northumbria--meaning vastly more than Northumberland, even all
the land from Humber to Forth--was evangelized. It was so that the great
English province of Mercia--the whole of the middle of the
island--received the message of Christ. It was so that Christianity was
given back to Essex and to us in London, by the labours of our Bishop
Cedd, consecrated, as the crown of his long and faithful labours among our
heathen predecessors, by the Celtic Bishop Finan of Lindisfarne. Cedd is
an admirable example of the careful methods of the Celtic Church. He was
not a Celt himself, he was an Angle. When the English branch of the Celtic
Church, settled at Lindisfarne and evangelizing Northumbria, had succeeded
in converting the son of the Mercian king, they sent him four priests as
missionaries to his people, a people who were in large part Angles. Of
these four priests, trained and sent by the Celtic Church for the
conversion of the English, only one was a Celt; the other three, including
Cedd, were themselves Angles. To send Anglian priests to convert Anglian
people was indeed a wise and broad policy; and it was, as it deserved to
be, eminently successful. It is a striking contradiction of the prevalent
idea that the Celtic Church was isolated, narrow, bigoted; unable and
unwilling to work with any but those of its own blood.

There are, then, these two main divisions before us, of the people who
occupied these islands when the Romans came, and still occupied them when
the English came, the Britons and the Celts[14]. We are not to suppose
that this is nothing more than a mere dead piece of archaeology. It is a
very living fact. A large proportion of those