Had this abject superstition produced general peace and
tranquillity, it had made some atonement for the ills attending it;
but besides the usual avidity of men for power and riches, frivolous
controversies in theology were engendered by it, which were so much
the more fatal, as they admitted not, like the others, of any final
determination from established possession. The disputes, excited in
Britain, were of the most ridiculous kind, and entirely worthy of those
ignorant and barbarous ages. There were some intricacies, observed by
all the Christian churches, in adjusting the day of keeping Easter;
which depended on a complicated consideration of the course of the sun
and moon; and it happened that the missionaries, who had converted the
Scots and Britons, had followed a different calendar from that which was
observed at Rome, in the age when Augustine converted the Saxons. The
priests also of all the Christian churches were accustomed to shave part
of their head; but the form given to this tonsure was different in the
former from what was practised in the latter. The Scots and Britons
pleaded the antiquity of _their_ usages; the Romans and their
disciples, the Saxons, insisted on the universality of _theirs_.
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