Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

80 THE DANES.
severe and to practise chastity so vigorous. " I have
felt sharper cold," or,
" I have seen harder and
severer things ".1
The vision of eternity had been burnt into his soul.
Modern scientists may smile at Drythelm's story,
and say that of course he was in a trance or a state
of hypnotism. But that may not be quite the point.
If God did no more than send him a forcible dream
about eternity, it is valuable to have it recorded so
as to have the construction which those ages put
upon the Scripture words nothing defiled can see God.
How far different would be the experience of a
modern hypnotise. It is doubtful whether God would
even enter his mind.
The noonday brightness of the Saxon Church soon
reached its zenith, and long before the reign of
Egbert there were signs of decay. Whether, as
often happens, the outward scourge was a token of
the inward falling away, is not perfectly clear, but
it is certain that the Danish invasions and the
terror they occasioned had a most disastrous result
on faith and morals. The Danes were a Scandinavian
tribe, who, full of pagan cruelty, thirsting
for blood, and perfectly at home on the sea, would
swoop down at their caprice upon any shore from
Iceland, and even the coast of North America, " to
the Straits of Gibraltar and the Balearic Isles. Lin-
disfarrie was a place of peculiarly holy memories.
It was there, in 793, that these ruthless men of
1 Hist. Eccles., lib. v. cap. xii.