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YORK.
CHAPTER
IV.
With the conversion of Peada and his people, Christianity
was now spreading over a wider extent of
country than it had hitherto occupied, and the resistance
of heathenism was in many ways weakened.
Another mission was now sent to the East Saxons.
Sigebert the Good, as in after time he was called, the
king of that people, had paid a visit to Oswy. Many
conversations passed between them on the great
subject of a God not made with hands, eternal in the
heavens.
" The passage in which Bede summarises
the Northumbrian king's pleading against idolatry is
one of the finest in his book ; it reads like a combination
of some well-known arguments of Isaiah,
with those grand words into which Tacitus compresses
the case for Monotheism. At last Sigebert yielded,
and was baptised by Finan at the same place where
Peada, not many months before, had made his Christian
profession. Like Peada, he sought teachers for
his people. Cedd was sent, and gathered many converts.
[a.d. 654.] In the following year he was consecrated
bishop of Lindisfarne by Finan, assisted
by two other bishops, and returned to the province
" with greater authority " than before. " He built
'
Bright's " Early English Church History," p. 169. He
refers to Isaiah xliv. 10, &c., and Tacitus' History, v. 51,
" Judaei mente sola unumque Deum intelligunt," &c.