Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LINDISFARNE AND WHITBY FROM the low-lying meadows of Somerset to the wild and wind-swept northern cliffs that frown on the German ocean is a long step, but here also are the beginnings of things to be; not so old by five hundred years, nor yet so meshed in legends and visions, and, if you like, fantastic fables, but venerable indeed, and deeply significant. Here, where the sudden cliffs break down into the ever- thundering sea and crabbed islands lift bravely out of tempestuous breakers, lashed by tumultuous winds and drenched by sea-spume and swirling fog, here were established the first outposts of the Catholic Faith in the North, in the year of our Lord 635, when Oswald, King of Northumbria, called St. Aidan from his monastery of St. Columba. Ten years before, Oswald's uncle, Eadwine, asking the hand of the daughter of the Christian King of Kent, had gained with his queen a Christian bishop and missionary in the person of St. Paulinus, one of the companions of St. Augustine, but sudden war had extinguished the flickering flame, and St. Aidan came to kindle it anew. It was a wild and barbarous land and a wild and barbarous society into which he came. It is told that the first missionary bishop from lona became discouraged within a year, and returned to his monastery, declaring the Northumbrians invincible iri their heathenism. Up rose on the word a monk named Aidan, crying, "Was it their stubbornness, or your severity?" Whereupon the entire chapter acclaimed him as the true Bishop of Northumbria, which he became indeed, and a saint as well. Barbarous the people undoubtedly were, but King Oswald was a man of splendid character, and the alliance of saint and king was invincible. Backed by royal favour and heartened by royal co-operation, Aidan, drawn by love of his isl...