Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

THE DANES. 87
It is not beside the mark to connect in a certain
sense the beginnings of England with the Dane.
They did more than prove a few chosen spirits : they
helped to make a great nation, though the process
was stern and lengthy, the results invisible at the
time, and the victims innumerable. As Joseph de
Maistre said of the Crusades : " No one of them succeeded,
yet they all succeeded ". Terror of the Dane
produced a line of kings who would have been an
honour to any country. The people, who were
smarting from those stripes, were far from realising
that a future England was being moulded in the
rude hands wrhich tore down their homes and
v
sanctuaries, and that the Church was not only to
recover from those ruins, but to rise from them with
a new life. Salus ex inimicis nostris is as true of
,
burning Croyland and its massacred monks as of the
Culturkampf g&ft United Italy.
Egbert, who had set in motion the stone which
was to destroy the heptarchy, died in 837, and was
succeeded by Ethelwulf, one of whose first acts
was to establish Swithin, his father's friend, in the
bishopric of Winchester. The sanctity of Swithin
gave him a moral weight in the king's counsels, and
his influence
"
was shared by Alstan, Bishop of Sher-
borne. In a king the wise choice of advisers will
cover a multitude of sins, and certainly Ethelwulf
supplemented his own lack of wisdom and strength
in this way. His early education had prepared him
r the Church, and probably for a life of prayer