until Augustine arrived on the Isle of Thanet A.D. 596.  The occasion of his being sent on this missionary errand is said to have been connected with an incident which has often been related, wherein it appears that Gregory, while yet a monk, struck with the beauty of some heathen Anglo-Saxon youths exposed for sale in the slave market at Rome, inquired concerning their nationality.  Being told that they were Angles, he said:  “Non Angli sed angeli [’Not Angles, but angels’], and well may, for their angel-like faces it becometh such to be coheirs with the angels in heaven.  In what province of England do they live?” “Deira” was the reply.  “From Dei ira [’God’s wrath’] are they to be freed?” answered Gregory.  “How call ye the king of that country?” “AElla.”  “Then Alleluia surely ought to be sung in his kingdom to the praise of that God who created all things,” said the gracious and clever monk.

“The conversion of the English to Christianity,” says Freeman, “at once altered their whole position in the world.  Hitherto our history had been almost wholly insular; our heathen forefathers had had but little to do, either in war or peace, with any nations beyond their own four seas.  We hear little of any connection being kept up between the Angles and Saxons who settled in Britain, and their kinsfolk who abode in their original country.  By its conversion England was first brought, not only within the pale of the Christian Church, but within the pale of the general political society of Europe.  But our insular position, combined with the events of our earlier history, was not without its effect on the peculiar character of Christianity as established in England.  England was the first great territorial conquest of the spiritual power, beyond the limits of the Roman Empire, beyond the influence of Greek and Roman civilization.”

The following account from the Ecclesiastical History of the Venerable Bede, the “father of English history,” and foremost scholar of England in his age, is in the modern English rendering by Thomson, of King Alfred’s famous translation, made for the instruction of the English people as the best work of that period on their own history.

     As a contrast John Richard Green’s treatment of the same episode is
     appended.

THE VENERABLE BEDE

When according to forthrunning time [it] was about five hundred and ninety-two years from Christ’s hithercoming, Mauricius, the Emperor, took to the government, and had it two-and-twenty years.  He was the fifty-fourth from Augustus.  In the tenth year of that Emperor’s reign, Gregory, the holy man, who was in lore and deed the highest, took to the bishophood of the Roman Church, and of the apostolic seat, and held and governed it thirteen years and six months and ten days.  In the fourteenth year of the same Emperor, about a hundred and fifty years from the English nation’s hithercoming into Britain, he was admonished by a divine impulse that he should send God’s servant Augustine, and many other monks with him, fearing the Lord, to preach God’s word to the English nation.