]
[** Bede, lib. iii. cap. 26.]
[*** Bede, lib. v. cap. 23. Bedae Epist. ad
Egbert.]
[**** Bedse Epist. ad Egbert.]
Another inconvenience which attended this corrupt species of
Christianity, was the superstitious attachment to Rome, and the gradual
subjection of the kingdom to a foreign jurisdiction. The Britons, having
never acknowledged any subordination to the Roman pontiff, had conducted
all ecclesiastical government by their domestic synods and councils;[*]
but the Saxons, receiving their religion from Roman monks, were taught
at the same time a profound reverence for that see, and were naturally
led to regard it as the capital of their religion. Pilgrimages to Rome
were represented as the most meritorious acts of devotion. Not only
noblemen and ladies of rank undertook this tedious journey,[**] but
kings themselves, abdicating their crowns, sought for a secure passport
to heaven at the feet of the Roman pontiff. New relics, perpetually sent
from that endless mint of superstition, and magnified by lying miracles,
invented in convents, operated on the astonished minds of the multitude.
And every prince has attained the eulogies of the monks, the only
historians of those ages, not in proportion to his civil and military
virtues, but to his devoted attachment towards their order, and his
superstitious reverence for Rome.
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