should like to have heard the sermon, and I hope you will feel somewhat
as I do!

"Christ despised not His young soldiers, although he was not present in
body at their slaughter. Blessed were they born that they might for His
sake suffer death. Happy is that their (tender) age, which was not yet
able to confess Christ, and was allowed to suffer for Christ. They were
the Saviour's witnesses, although as yet they knew Him not. They were
not ripe for the slaughter, but yet did they blessedly die to live!
Blessed was their birth, for they found eternal life on the threshold of
this present life. They were snatched from mother-breasts, but they were
straightway given into the keeping of angel-bosoms. The cruel persecutor
(Herod) could with no service benefit those little ones so greatly as he
benefited them with the hatred of his cruel persecution. They are called
martyrs' blossoms because they were as blossoms upspringing in the cold
of earth's unbelief, thus withered with the frost of persecution.
Blessed are the wombs that bare them, and the breasts which suckled such
as these. The mothers indeed suffered in the martyrdom of their
children; the sword which pierced the children's limbs pierced to the
mothers' hearts: and it must needs be that they be sharers of the
eternal reward, when they were companions in the suffering."

I will now tell you about a very different kind of sermon from
Ælfric's--one of the sermons preached by Wulfstan, Archbishop of York,
who was not, like Ælfric, leading a quiet life in an abbey, but throwing
himself into the struggles and needs of a most disastrous time. He saw
how the Danish inroads had terribly demoralised the English people, and
he spoke out as God's preacher, who comes face to face with wrong, must
speak.