In the age of Alfred, however, there were not only these public acts
of acknowledgment recognizing the papal supremacy, but there was
a strong tide of personal and private feeling of veneration and
attachment to the mother Church, of which it is hard for us, in the
present divided state of Christendom, to conceive. The religious
thoughts and affections of every pious heart throughout the realm
centered in Rome. Rome, too, was the scene of many miracles, by which
the imaginations of the superstitious and of the truly devout were
excited, which impressed them with an idea of power in which they felt
a sort of confiding sense of protection. This power was continually
interposing, now in one way and now in another, to protect virtue, to
punish crime, and to testify to the impious and to the devout, to each
in an appropriate way, that their respective deeds were the objects,
according to their character, of the displeasure or of the approbation
of Heaven.

On one occasion, the following incident is said to have occurred. The
narration of it will illustrate the ideas of the time. A child of
about seven years old, named Kenelm, succeeded to the throne in the
Anglo-Saxon line. Being too young to act for himself, he was put under
the charge of a sister, who was to act as regent until the boy became
of age. The sister, ambitious of making the power thus delegated
to her entirely her own, decided on destroying her brother. She
commissioned a hired murderer to perpetrate the deed. The murderer
took the child into a wood, killed him, and hid his body in a thicket,
in a certain cow-pasture at a place called Clent. The sister then
assumed the scepter in her own name, and suppressed all inquiries in
respect to the fate of her brother; and his murder might have remained
forever undiscovered, had it not been miraculously revealed at Rome.