“Beyond this ground of certainty, we may indulge in a little excursus into lingual affinities of wide range.  The root mol is clear enough.  It is of the same stock as the Greek mala, Latin mul(tum), and Hebrew m’la.  But, Rose?  We call her Queen of Flowers, and since before the Persian poets made much of her, she was everywhere Regina Florum.  Why should not the name mean simply the Queen, the Chief?  Now, so few who know Keltic know also Hebrew, and so few who know Hebrew know also Keltic, that few know the surprising extent of the affinity that exists—­clear as day—­between the Keltic and the Hebrew vocabularies.  That the word Rose may be a case in point is not hazardously speculative.”]

Summing now the features I have too shortly specified in the Saxon character,—­its imagination, its docility, its love of knowledge, and its love of beauty, you will be prepared to accept my conclusive statement, that they gave rise to a form of Christian faith which appears to me, in the present state of my knowledge, one of the purest and most intellectual ever attained in Christendom;—­never yet understood, partly because of the extreme rudeness of its expression in the art of manuscripts, and partly because, on account of its very purity, it sought no expression in architecture, being a religion of daily life, and humble lodging.  For these two practical reasons, first;—­and for this more weighty third, that the intellectual character of it is at the same time most truly, as Dean Stanley told you, childlike; showing itself in swiftness of imaginative apprehension, and in the fearlessly candid application of great principles to small things.  Its character in this kind may be instantly felt by any sympathetic and gentle person who will read carefully the book I have already quoted to you, the Venerable Bede’s life of St. Cuthbert; and the intensity and sincerity of it in the highest orders of the laity, by simply counting the members of Saxon Royal families who ended their lives in monasteries.

Now, at the very moment when this faith, innocence, and ingenuity were on the point of springing up into their fruitage, comes the Northern invasion; of the real character of which you can gain a far truer estimate by studying Alfred’s former resolute contest with and victory over the native Norman in his paganism, than by your utmost endeavours to conceive the character of the afterwards invading Norman, disguised, but not changed, by Christianity.  The Norman could not, in the nature of him, become a Christian at all; and he never did;—­he only became, at his best, the enemy of the Saracen.  What he was, and what alone he was capable of being, I will try to-day to explain.