there was no time to think of the lone island in the Western Sea, which all the time was undergoing a revolution, more peaceful, but none the less important, and was founding and developing its Christian institutions in its own way—modifying them and adapting them, as we have seen, by its own native genius.
The invasion and subjugation of England made this isolation more complete. The Angles and other German tribes who landed in England, unlike their brethren on the Continent, were bitterly hostile to the faith of the people whose lands they seized. The Gauls submitted to and made friends with their conquerors, and the result was that they soon brought them under the power of their religion and civilization. The Britons, on the contrary, contested every inch of their territory, and provoked a war of extermination, in which their nation and religion were alike obliterated. The testimony of language witnesses to us what a radical difference there was in the two cases. When the Franks conquered Gaul, its language was Latin; but that language of the vanquished held its ground, and quite overcame the tongue of the victors, so that modern French may be said to be the direct lineal descendant of the language spoken before the conquest. The English tongue, on the other hand, has not been appreciably influenced by the ancient British. The Celtic element is insignificant at the best, and has been in great part derived from other sources. Thus it happened that while Ireland was being converted to Christianity, a reverse process was taking place in England. There the old British Church was being destroyed, and heathenism was being set up in its place. The effect of this was to introduce a bitterly hostile and unbelieving nation which, like
