Then, roughly, a hundred years later, in 590, Ethelbert, the fifth from Hengist, and Bertha, the third from Clotilde, are king and queen of Kent.  I cannot find the date of their marriage, but the date, 590, which you must recollect for cardinal, is that of Gregory’s accession to the pontificate, and I believe Bertha was then in middle life, having persevered in her religion firmly, but inoffensively, and made herself beloved by her husband and people.  She, in England, Theodolinda in Lombardy, and St. Gregory in Rome:—­in their hands, virtually lay the destiny of Europe.

Then the period from Bertha to Osburga, 590 to 849—­say 250 years—­is passed by the Saxon people in the daily more reverent learning of the Christian faith, and daily more peaceful and skilful practice of the humane arts and duties which it invented and inculcated.

The statement given by Sir Edward Creasy of the result of these 250 years of lesson is, with one correction, the most simple and just that I can find.

“A few years before the close of the sixth century, the country was little more than a wide battle-field, where gallant but rude warriors fought with each other, or against the neighbouring Welsh or Scots; unheeding and unheeded by the rest of Europe, or, if they attracted casual attention, regarded with dread and disgust as the fiercest of barbarians and the most untameable of pagans.  In the eighth century, England was looked up to with admiration and gratitude, as superior to all the other countries of Western Europe in piety and learning, and as the land whence the most zealous and successful saints and teachers came forth to convert and enlighten the still barbarous regions of the continent.”

This statement is broadly true; yet the correction it needs is a very important one.  England,—­under her first Alfred of Northumberland, and under Ina of Wessex, is indeed during these centuries the most learned, thoughtful, and progressive of European states.  But she is not a missionary power.  The missionaries are always to her, not from her:—­for the very reason that she is learning so eagerly, she does not take to preaching.  Ina founds his Saxon school at Rome not to teach Rome, nor convert the Pope, but to drink at the source of knowledge, and to receive laws from direct and unquestioned authority.  The missionary power was wholly Scotch and Irish, and that power was wholly one of zeal and faith, not of learning.  I will ask you, in the course of my next lecture, to regard it attentively; to-day, I must rapidly draw to the conclusions I would leave with you.