back into Paganism. Ireland, therefore, which for a while had made a
part of Christendom, had been broken short off by the heathen conquest
of Britain. It was now a small, isolated fragment of Christendom, with a
great mass of heathenism between. We can easily imagine what a stimulus
to all the eager enthusiasts of the Faith the consciousness of this
neighbourhood must have been; how keen the desire to rush to the assault
and to replace the Cross where it had been before.

That assault was not, however, begun by Ireland; it was begun, as every
one knows, by St. Augustine, a Roman priest, sent by Pope Gregory, who
landed at Ebbsfleet, in the Isle of Thanet, in the year 597--thirty-two
years after St. Columba left Ireland. If the South of England owes its
conversion to Rome, Northern England owes its conversion to Ireland,
through the Irish colony at Iona. Oswald, the king of Northumbria, had
himself taken refuge in Iona in his youth, and when summoned to reign he
at once called in the Irish missionaries, acting himself, we are told,
as their interpreter. His whole reign was one continuous struggle with
heathenism, and although at his death it triumphed for a time, in the
end the faith and energies of the missionaries carried all before them.
After the final defeat of the Mercians, under their king Penda, at
Winwoed, in 655, the struggle was practically over. Northern and
Southern England were alike once more Christian.

One of the chief agents in this result was the Irish monk Aidan, who had
fixed his seat in the little peninsula of Lindisfarne, and from whose
monastery, as from another Iona, missionaries poured over the North of
England. At Lichfield, Whitby, and many other places religious houses
sprang up, all owing their allegiance to Lindisfarne, and through it to
Iona and Ireland.