Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

KING ALFRED. 93
put Alfred in possession of their redoubtable chief,
Guthrum, in whose person the Saxon prince inaugurated
the Danish conversion. Alfred's valour won
the first fruits »of Edmund's blood. The baptism of
Guthrum, followed by that of thirty chiefs, and, it is
said, of many Danes, was an event in the ecclesiastical
annals of England. Even now our national
character shows the Danish impress, the mark then
left upon it by invasions and subsequent dominion.
Alfred stood godfather to Guthrum, but when once he
had asserted his kingship and his Christian feeling,
he directed all his energy to Wessex, tolerating the
possession of Northumbria and East Anglia by the
Dane. .
The two questions which specially occupied
Alfred's mind were education and the practical worship
of God, applied first to the affairs of his kingdom
and then to the details of everyday life. Much has
been said about the ignorance of those times, but it
is not generally understood that the knowledge of
reading then involved that of Latin. Saxon was the
spoken, whilst Latin was the written language, hence
those who could not read were not by any means the
illiterate people they would be at the present time.
On the whole the non-reading of those days contrasts
favourably with the idle reading of to-day. The
literary stomach of those generations wras not spoiled.
It was prepared to digest solid food, the good beef
and mutton in the book market, whilst it would
have turned away with loathing from the sickly, not