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There was no Count of the Saxon Shore
 To meet her hand to hand,
As she took the beach with a surge and a roar,
 And the pirates rushed inland.

The British Christians.Early in the fourth century the Roman Empire had become Christian. And among the benefits Rome had brought to Britain was the preaching of the Gospel. We know very little about the old British Church, except the names of several martyrs who died for the faith before the conversion of the Empire. One of these was the soldier, St. Alban, to whom the greatest abbey in England was afterwards dedicated. It is probable, however, that, as in other parts of the Roman Empire, Britain was divided into bishoprics, churches were built, and heathen temples pulled down.

The heathen Saxons and English.Our English and Saxon friends, when they first landed in Kent and Eastern Britain, were violent—you might almost say conscientious—heathens. They feared and and hated Christianity and all other traces of Roman civilization; and they rooted out everything Roman that they could lay hands on. Other provinces of the Empire, Italy, France and Spain, were also being overrun by barbarians, but none of these were as remorseless and destructive as the Saxons. Therefore, in Italy, France and Spain, the ‘re-making’ of nations on the ruins of Rome began fairly soon, but not in Britain. The Saxons made a clean sweep of the eastern half of the island, from the Forth to the Channel and westwards to the Severn. An old British chronicle gives us a hint of the awful thoroughness with which they worked. ‘Some therefore of the miserable remnant (of Britons) being taken in the mountains were murdered in great