The southern parts of England received their improvements directly through the channel of Rome.  The kingdom of Northumberland, as soon as it was converted, began to contend with the southern provinces in an emulation of piety and learning.  The ecclesiastics then [there?] also kept up and profited by their intercourse with Rome; but they found their principal resources of knowledge from another and a more extraordinary quarter.  The island of Hii, or Columbkill,[46] is a small and barren rock in the Western Ocean.  But in those days it was high in reputation as the site of a monastery which had acquired great renown for the rigor of its studies and the severity of its ascetic discipline.  Its authority was extended over all the northern parts of Britain and Ireland; and the monks of Hii even exercised episcopal jurisdiction over all those regions.  They had a considerable share both in the religious and literate institution of the Northumbrians.  Another island, of still less importance, in the mouth of the Tees [Tweed?], and called Lindisfarne, was about this time sanctified by the austerities of an hermit called Cuthbert.  It soon became also a very celebrated monastery.  It was, from a dread of the ravages of pirates, removed first to the adjacent part of the continent, and on the same account finally to Durham.  The heads of this monastery omitted nothing which could contribute to the glory of their founder and to the dignity of their house, which became, in a very short time, by their assiduous endeavors, the most considerable school perhaps in Europe.

The great and justest boast of this monastery is the Venerable Beda, who was educated and spent his whole life there.  An account of his writings is an account of the English learning in that age, taken in its most advantageous view.  Many of his works remain, and he wrote both in prose and verse, and upon all sorts of subjects.  His theology forms the most considerable part of his writings.  He wrote comments upon almost the whole Scripture, and several homilies on the principal festivals of the Church.  Both the comments and sermons are generally allegorical in the construction of the text, and simply moral in the application.  In these discourses several things seem strained and fanciful; but herein he followed entirely the manner of the earlier fathers, from whom the greatest part of his divinity is not so much imitated as extracted.  The systematic and logical method, which seems to have been first introduced into theology by John of Damascus, and which after wards was known by the name of School Divinity, was not then in use, at least in the Western Church, though soon after it made an amazing progress.  In this scheme the allegorical gave way to the literal explication, the imagination had less scope, and the affections were less touched.  But it prevailed by an appearance more solid and philosophical, by an order more scientific, and by a readiness of application either for the solution or the exciting of doubts and difficulties.