S. Augustine had begun his similar work in the South. At one time there seemed to be some danger that the Christians, who had received their Christianity from Rome, and the Christians, who had received their Christianity from Iona, would refuse to join together so as to form one Church; but in the year 664 a conference of the two parties was held at Whitby, and it was decided that the whole nation, both in the North and in the South, should keep the Roman discipline, and should be organized as one Church, with the Archbishop or Metropolitan of Canterbury, the successor of S. Augustine, as the chief Bishop.

Four years after the Conference at Whitby, a very great man, who was the only Eastern who ever ruled in England as a Bishop, I mean Theodore of Tarsus, became Metropolitan and Archbishop of Canterbury. He was almost like a second founder of the English Church. He reduced all things to order, established new bishoprics where they were needed, and consecrated Bishops for them; he held synods and promulgated canons of discipline; and in preparation for the sixth Ecumenical Council he, with the Bishops subject to him, condemned the Monothelite heresy and made clear the orthodoxy of the Church of England. You Russians, who belong to the great Eastern Church, ought to take special interest in Archbishop Theodore, an Eastern like yourselves, whom God gave to the Church of England to be, as it were, its second founder. He presided over the see of Canterbury and over the whole Church of England from the year 668 to the year 690.

When S. Gregory first sent S. Augustine to England, he had planned that there should be two Metropolitans,

one in the South and the other in the North. But S. Gregory's plan was not immediately carried into effect. As we have seen, the North of England was evangelized by Celtic missionaries from Iona, and the Celtic Church had no Metropolitans. Consequently the only Archbishop or Metropolitan in England was the Archbishop of Canterbury in the South. York was the chief city in the North; but the Bishop of York was not a Metropolitan, he was, at any rate from the time of the primacy of Theodore of Tarsus, one of the Bishops of the Province of Canterbury. However, in the year 734 it was determined that S. Gregory's original plan should be carried out, and that there should be two Metropolitans. The larger part of England, containing a good many dioceses, remained under the Southern Metropolitan, the Archbishop of Canterbury; and the smaller part of England, in the North, with only a few dioceses, had for its Metropolitan the Archbishop of York. And from 734 to the present day the English Church in England has been divided into two provinces, each with its own Archbishop. The only exception to this state of things was that for sixteen years, from 787 to 803, a third province was constituted in the centre of England, with Lichfield as the seat of its Archbishopic. But this innovation was soon got rid of.

For rather more than five centuries the Roman Popes interfered very little with the Church of England. Once or twice individuals appealed to the Pope; but such conduct was regarded with disapprobation by the country at large; and if the Pope's decision was disliked, it was ignored and set aside. On some very rare occasions the Popes sent legates to England, but

it was at the request of the King. When in later times the Pope claimed to send legates to England on his own initiative, he was told that no legate could be received in England unless the King agreed to such a course being taken. The Pope had nothing to do in those days with the appointment of our Archbishops and Bishops. They were chosen and consecrated in England without any reference to him. Only in the case of the Archbishops, after they had been appointed, and either consecrated or translated, and finally enthroned, they applied to the Pope for the gift of the pall, which he gave or sent to them as a mark of honour, and as a token that they were in communion with himself and his Apostolic see; but the English Archbishops exercised all their metropolitical authority, from the day of their consecration, without waiting for the gift of the pall. Letters and bulls from the Pope could not be published in England, unless the King gave his consent to such publication. I am describing the relation of the Church of England to the Roman Popes from the first coming of S. Augustine to England until the death of King Henry I. in 1135, a period of more than five centuries.

After the death of Henry I., during the four centuries which followed, the Pope succeeded in obtaining little by little a considerable increase of power over the Church of England. How did this come about? I think that it was due in a very large degree to what are called the forged decretals of the Pseudo-Isidore. These documents were forged in France in the middle of the ninth century. They professed to be letters written by the early Bishops of Rome of the first, second and third centuries. And in these letters, these

early Roman Bishops are represented as claiming monarchical powers over all parts of the Catholic Church, whether in the East or in the West. In the ninth century there was very little learning in the churches of the West. No one accepts these documents now as genuine; but in the ninth and following centuries they were accepted as genuine. But not much use of them was made until about two centuries after they were forged. It was in the time of Hildebrand, who became, near the end of his life, Pope, and was known by the title of Gregory VII., that these forged decretals began to be inserted into the collections of the canons. But there was not much knowledge of them in England. until after the reign of Henry I., when a handbook of canon-law which included a great deal of matter taken from the forged decretals, was published under the title of the Decretum by an Italian monk, named Gratian; and this handbook became extraordinarily popular in all parts of the West, not only on the Continent but also in England. People now learnt to regard the Pope as a spiritual autocrat, who could legislate for the whole Church, and could interfere in every diocese, and could appoint Bishops wherever he liked, and could also depose them from their office at his own will. All spiritual jurisdiction was regarded as emanating from him; and any Christian might appeal from the Church courts of his own country to the great central appeal-court at Rome. And all this vast authority was supposed to have been bestowed by our Lord on S. Peter, who was regarded as the first Pope, and to have been bequeathed by him to his successors in the see of Rome.

There was another event which tended to increase

the Papal power in the West, and therefore in England as being part of the West; and that was the sad breach of communion between the East and the West, which took place in 1054, in the time of Pope Leo IX. of Rome, and of the Patriarch Michael Cerularius of Constantinople. The result of that breach of communion was in the West to isolate the Roman see, as the only Apostolic see, of which Western Christians knew anything. Before that breach of communion,

Western Christians had been familiar with the idea of the Church Catholic having for its leaders the occupants of five apostolic or at any rate patriarchal sees; namely the Bishops of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. But after 1054, four of these five sees were outside the communion which the Westerns recognized as the only Catholic communion; and consequently the see of Rome towered up alone in its majesty as an Apostolic see, whereas before it had been regarded as only one out of five such sees. The result was that the balance of power in the Church was overthrown; and there were no checks to the inordinate development of the claims of the Pope.

So far as I know, the Church of England had absolutely nothing whatever to do with the breach between the East and the West. In those days the English people, living on their island, were very much cut off from the movements of thought and the great events which might be happening on the Continent. We English in all probability did not hear about the cessation of inter-communion between the East and the West until several years after that event took place; and when we did hear about it, we could only have heard the Pope's account of the matter. Unless I am