duce Dunstan to crush this youthful

love of his, and to embrace the monastic life according to Benedictine rule. The young man was not slow in reading the motive of his kinsman, and for a long time he was proof against all his arguments, inducements, and threats; but by slow degrees ambition began to take the place of love in his heart, and as in that age every one, but the soldier and the priest, was treated with contempt, after a fearful struggle, which induced a return of his dreadful disease, he made his choice and decided for the priesthood. He resolutely crushed all sweet thoughts of home and married life, and hastened to Fleury, there to learn the rule of St. Benedict, and to conform to the discipline of the continental monasteries. He returned to Glastonbury a monk in thought, feeling, and endeavour; and the Benedictine rule not being established in the monastery where he had received his early education, he lived an anchorite's life, shutting himself up in a cell five feet long and two and a half wide, with height sufficient to enable a man to stand if half his body were buried under the ground, otherwise it was scarcely breast-high.

It was not without many a terrible conflict that Dunstan settled himself down to live the life which he had chosen at the expense of all the softer and gentler emotions of his nature. At times his thoughts were so maddening, that he could only banish them by working at the forge until he was well-nigh exhausted. He would fast until his very life was in danger; his prayers were agonising shrieks for relief from the power of the devil, with whom, according to the wellknown story, he was once brought

A doubt has the sincerity

into personal conflict. never been thrown upon and consistency of the young man during these days of fierce conflict and temptation, and it is with a feeling of relief that we see him with his mind completely restored, and accepting the royal monastery of Glastonbury which King Edmund graciously offered to him. A new and an agreeable life now presented itself to Dunstan. Being the possessor of an ample fortune, he began at once to spend it nobly in rebuilding the church, and surrounding it with conventual buildings. As Abbot, he introduced the Benedictine rule, dismissed the monks of the old foundation, expelled the married clergy, insisted on his monks devoting themselves to study, and in short, made that old monastery of Glastonbury the great public school of England during the remainder of the Anglo-Saxon period. A man of such varied abilities as Dunstan was not likely to remain unknown beyond the region of his own monastery; and acting upon the advice of Chancellor Thurketul, we find the king recalling the abbot to court, and inviting him to become one of his counsellors.

The country was in anything but a satisfactory state when the Abbot of Glastonbury accepted this invitation. Most disastrous terms for England had been made with the Danes, but to Dunstan's genius we owe it that by one grand blow five burghs were wrested from them, and colonised by the English. In the peace which followed, Dunstan, in conjunction with the chancellor, proceeded to carry out the ecclesiastical policy which marked his entire life. All the higher offices of the Church he conferred upon the men of his party, and

he forced the Benedictine rule upon monasteries and cathedrals. He had naturally to encounter much opposition, but he exerted all his influence and power to carry his favourite measures, and not without success. While our sympathies are with the married clergy, we cannot but wonder at the resoluteness of the man, who was little scrupulous as to means if he believed the end justified them. During the reign of Edred, so great was the monarch's affection for the abbot, that he pressed upon him the acceptance of the bishopric of Winchester; but while Odo lived, Dunstan had, in reality, all the power in the realm that he wished; he would not be stronger as Bishop of Winchester than as Abbot of Glastonbury. Upon the king pressing the matter, Dunstan positively refused to accept preferment, making, however, this exception, that as Odo was now an old man, if the see of Canterbury were vacant, he might feel it to be his duty to accept it. As we have seen in our sketch of Odo, upon the accession of Edwy, the married clergy rose into power for a brief season, and Dunstan was disgraced and exiled; but when Edgar, the brother of Edwy, was proclaimed king, the Abbot was recalled and returned in triumph. He now, for his own purposes, without resigning the monastery of Glastonbury, became Bishop both of Worcester and of London. The see of Canterbury, however, he nearly lost. Upon the death of Odo, Edwy, who still remembered Dunstan's harsh treatment, nominated to the vacant see one Elfsin, a violent secularist, whose first act at Canterbury was to treat the memory of Odo with contempt. Upon his death, shortly after his appointment, another

of Edwy's party was nominated, but before his translation King Edgar was upon the throne, and, as the result, Dunstan was Archbishop of Canterbury. Now that he had been raised to the most dignified position he could ever hope to obtain, it delights one to observe in the character of the archbishop some remains of that gentler nature, which was his before the day when he resolved to be a priest. To the last his friendship for Odo was profound and tender. Upon the death of Edwy, there is reason to believe that he felt some remorse for the many miseries through which the unhappy monarch had to pass; at all events he desired that no insult should be

offered to his memory. Nor did he make any attempt to remove the secular clergy from his cathedral. "The truth is, says Dr. Hook, "that although Dunstan was always at his post when required, the discharge of his episcopal duties was always a secondary consideration with him. The clerical and monastic reformation conducted under his auspices was only a part of his general policy as minister of the country. His position is in the first rank of ecclesiastical statesmen, such as Becket, Wolsey, Laud, Richelieu, and Mazarin. He was the minister of Edgar, whose reign is one of the most glorious in the Anglo-Saxon annals, and he secured for his sovereign a title of which even Alfred might have been proud, "the Pacific." It was no slight task to make anything glorious of a young man so mean and vicious as Edgar proved himself; but Dunstan attempted it, and although he failed in working any reformation in a man so arrogant and wicked, he yet so contrived as to connect with Edgar's name

everything that was popular and glorious during his reign. "At the same time," observes the able writer from whom we have already quoted, "it is to be wished that credit could be given to Dunstan for maintaining his interest in a profligate court, and over a licentious king, without unworthy compromises, or a sacrifice of his Christian consistency. Of the extreme debauchery of the king Dunstan could not have been ignorant; but only on one occasion do we find him venturing to interfere," and then for one of the most dastardly outrages on record, certain fasts were imposed upon the king, which after all might be easily evaded, and a penance inflicted which did not cost the vicious monarch a single pleasure.

It must not be supposed, however, that the secular clergy allowed the Archbishop and the Benedictine party to pursue their way without opposition. Upon the death of Edgar, in 975, the secularists again aimed at the possession of power, by joining with the widow of the late king to secure the election of her son Ethelred to the throne. They had really no just ground on which to stand, which Dunstan no sooner saw, than he boldly defended the right of Ethelred's elder brother Edward, and ended the matter by proclaiming Edward, and then and there anointing him king of England. Among those who at this time befriended the married clergy in their pitiable condition-for they had to beg their bread-was the Scottish Bishop Beoruhelm, a man of great learning, eloquence, and piety, and of whom even Dunstan was somewhat afraid.

At all the meetings which were held to sympathise with the married clergy and to take their

claims into consideration, the voice of Beoruhelm was heard indignantly denouncing their oppressors. Dunstan was by no means easy in his mind during the progress of this agitation, and with two events which occurred at this period his name stands clouded with suspicion, if not covered with disgrace. They have been thus described:-"At a council held at Winchester, which was attended by the Ealdorman, Ethelwin, Ethelwold, and Brihtnoth, all advocates of the secular clergy, when Dunstan was unable to meet the arguments eloquently enforced by his learned opponent, and when the married clergy and the monks, who had been driven from their cloisters, were beginning clamorously to demand the immediate restitution of their rights and preferments, a low voice was heard as if coming from a crucifix in the room, saying, 'Let it not be, let it not be! Ye have judged well; to change were not well!' All were astonished, some alarmed, and the Dunstanites, in the confusion, succeeded in obtaining the adjournment of an assembly in which they were sure to be outvoted. Bishop Beoruhelm, the Ealdorman, and the opposition generally, were by no means satisfied with the proceedings of the Dunstanites on this occasion, and never rested until in 978 another council was convened in Calne, in Wiltshire. The king was not present; his life, it is to be remarked, was of peculiar value to the Dunstanites. The council was not held in the open air, but in the upper room of a house. The dispute was carried on between the parties with considerable acrimony. Bishop Beoruhelm pressed Dunstan so hard that the latter attempted no

reply a remarkable circumstance when we consider the character of the man. He merely spoke of himself as an old man, whose time of labour had now come to an end, who wished to pass the rest of his life in peace. As for his cause, it was the cause of Heaven, and to God he left the decision. There was, as he uttered these words, a fearful crash. The floor of the room had given way. All were precipitated to the ground except Dunstan and his friends, who had the good fortune to have taken their seat on the only solid beam. Few escaped without injury, and some were killed.

The populace

sided with the Dunstanites, and it was supposed that the question had been decided by a miracle. Some persons remind us that Dunstan was not only a ventriloquist, but also a man skilled in mechanics." Fuller says, "that Dunstan, who had so much of a smith, had here something of a carpenter in him, and some device used by him, about pinning and propping up the room.".

But the cause of the secular clergy received its heaviest blow when the young King Edward was assassinated by his step-mother, and his successor, Ethelred the Unready, was placed under the control of the archbishop. With the disasters of the new king's most disastrous reign, Dunstan happily had nothing whatever to do. Though Though Ethelred was innocent, it is said that Dunstan pronounced at his coronation a malediction on his reign for the guilt of his mother and her accomplices, and the prophecy of ill was terribly accomplished, though not in the old archbishop's day. Not caring to maintain a perpetual contention with the foolish Ethelred, whose dislike he

had incurred, the aged man retired to Canterbury, and resided there while his end drew near. In his old age he could preach eloquently, and crowds flocked to hear him. We are told also of his zeal in the erection of churches, of the equity of his judg ments, and of the force of argument by which he convinced gainsayers. As a specimen of his style, as well as to show the character of the period in which he lived, we select a few paragraphs from his "Canons made in King Edgar's Reign":

"We charge that God's servants diligently perform their service and ministry to God, and intercede for all Christian folk, and that every priest industriously advance Christianity, and extinguish heathenism, and forbid the worship of fountains, and necromancy, and auguries, and enchantments, and soothsaying, and false worship, and legerdemain, which carry men into various impostures; and to groves and ellens, and also many trees of divers sorts, and stones. And many do exercise themselves in variety of whimseys to such a degree as they by no means ought to do. And that every Christian man diligently win his child to Christianity, and teach him the Lord's Prayer and the Creed. And that men on holy days forbear heathenish songs and diabolical sports. And that men abstain on the Sunday from markets and county courts. And that men abstain from fabulous readings and absurd fashions, and scandalous shavings of the hair. And that every man learn to be expert in saying the Lord's Prayer and the Creed, as he desires to lie in holy ground, or to be (esteemed) worthy of the housel; he who refuseth to learn that is not

ance:

a good Christian; and he cannot of right undertake for others at baptism nor at the bishop's hands. And let no man be buried in a church unless it be known that he in his life-time have so pleased God that men on that account allow him to be worthy of such a burying-place." The following, too, is curious in relation to pen-"If any one destroy another by witchcraft, let him fast seven years-three in bread and water, and the other four years, three days in a week in bread and water, and ever lament it. If one drive a stake into a man, let him fast three years in bread and water; but if the man be dead by means of the staking, then let him fast seven years as is here written, and ever lament it.”

In the year 988, Dunstan, by his increasing feebleness and many symptoms of approaching dissolution, was warned to set his house in order, and be ready at any moment to bid adieu to time. It was not without the greatest difficulty that he preached on Ascension Day for the last time. He had to pause once or twice, and to retire from the pulpit, to which he nevertheless returned to finish his discourse. In it, he dwelt upon the incarnation of our Lord, upon the redemption of man, and the joys of the heavenly kingdom. He exhorted his hearers to ascend in their hearts

to that blest place whither their Saviour had gone before; he bade them affectionately to remember him when he was gone, for he had a feeling that this would be the last time that they would hear him. He had strength sufficient however to sit down to the banquet in the public hall, and revisiting the church on his way home, he calmly pointed out the place in which he wished to be interred. Upon entering his palace he retired to his chamber, where he engaged in devotional exercises and in conversation with his friends. On the day before he died he received the communion, and uttered the following prayer:-"Glory to Thee, Almighty Father, who hast provided for them that love Thee the Bread of Life, that we may be ever mindful of Thy wonderful mercy in sending to us Thine only begotten Son, born of the Virgin Mary. Virgin Mary. Glory to Thee, O heavenly Father, for when we were not, Thou didst give unto us existence, and when we were sinners, Thou didst grant unto us a Saviour. Glory to Thee, through the same, Thy Son, our Lord and God, who with Thee and the Holy Ghost, doth govern all things, world without end." These were the last words of Archbishop Dunstan, and on the Sunday after Ascension Day, 988, he was buried near the altar.