CANTERBURY [Footnote: From "Two Months Abroad." Printed privately.
(1878.)]

BY THE EDITOR


An Anglo-Saxon man may get down to first principles in Canterbury. He
reaches the dividing point in England between the old faith of Pagans and
the new religion of Jesus the Christ. The founder of the new gospel had
been dead five hundred years when England accepted Him, and acceptance
came only after the Saxon King Ethelbert had married Bertha, daughter of a
Frankish prince. Here in Canterbury Ethelbert held his court. Bertha, like
her father, was a Christian. After her marriage, Bertha herself for some
years held Christian services here alone in little St. Martin's Church,
but Ethelbert still loved his idols; indeed, for many years, he continued
to worship Odin and Thor. St. Patrick had been in Ireland a full century
before this.

Bertha as a Christian stood almost alone in Saxon England, but her
persistence at last so wrought upon Ethelbert that he wrote a letter to
Pope Gregory the Great, asking that a missionary be sent to England. This
was in the sixth century. St. Augustine and forty monks were dispatched by
Gregory to the English shore. To-day I have seen the church where this
great missionary preached. It still contains the font from which he
baptized his many English converts. In this church King Ethelbert himself
embraced Christianity, and so it was that the union of Church and State
was here effected. Canterbury then became the mother of the Church of