A.D. 855. Meanwhile matters had retrograded in Denmark. Eric CHAP. XI. the Red, though not professedly a Christian, had, as we have seen, aided the archbishop in the introduction of Christianity. His apostasy provoked the inveterate hostility of the Northmen. The sea-kings determined to avenge the insults offered to their laws, their institutions, their national gods. Rallying from all quarters under the banner of Guthrun, the nephew of Eric, they attacked the apostate king near Flensburgh in Jutland. The battle raged for three days, and at its close Eric and Guthrun', with " a cohort of Kings and Jarls," lay dead on the field; and so tremendous had been the slaughter that all the Viking nobility seemed to have been utterly exterminated. The new king, Eric II., easily persuaded by one of the pagan chiefs that the recent reverses were owing to the apostasy of his predecessor, ordered one of the churches to be closed, and forbade all further missionary operations. After a while, however, he was induced to change his policy, and Anskar, on his return from Sweden, was reinstated in the royal favour, and received a grant of land for the erection of a second church at Ripa, in Jutland, over which he placed Rimbert, a native priest, charging him to win the hearts of his barbarous flock by the sincerity and devotion of his life. The new king further evinced the change in had to the lots, but no heathen deity was found willing to aid them. Then "quidam negotiatorum, memores doctrinæ institutionis domini Episcopi, suggerere eis cœperunt: 'Deus,' inquiunt,Christianorum multoties ad se clamantibus auxiliatur, et potentissimus est in adjuvando. Quæramus an ille nobiscum esse velit, et vota ei placita libenti animo spondeamus.' Omnium itaque rogatu supplici missa est sors, et inventum, quod Christus eis vellet auxiliari. Quod cum publice denunciatum cunctis innotuisset, omnium corda ita subito roborata sunt, ut confestim ad urbem expugnandam intre pidi vellent accedere. 'Quid,' in- 1 "Tanta cæde utrique mactati CHAP. XI. his sentiments by permitting, what had hitherto been strictly forbidden through fear of enchantment, the suspension of a bell in the church of Schleswig1. A. D. 856-865. Anskar's ef forts to check slavery. Close of his life. A.D. 865. Anskar now returned to Hamburg, and devoted himself to the administration of his diocese. One of the last acts of his life was a noble effort to check the infamous practice of the slave-trade, which recalls the similar efforts of the Apostle of Ireland with the chief Coroticus. A number of native Christians had been carried off by the Northern pirates, and reduced to slavery. Effecting their escape, they sought refuge in the territory of North Albingia. Instead of sheltering the fugitives, some of the chiefs captured them again, and while they retained some as their own slaves, sold others to pagan and even professedly Christian tribes around. News of this reached Anskar, and, at the risk of his life, he determined to confront the guilty chiefs in person, and rebuke them for their cruelty. A vision of Christ, he declared, had prompted him to this resolve, and he carried his point. Sternly and dauntlessly he rebuked the chiefs, and succeeded in inducing them to set the captives once more free, and to ransom as many as possible from the bondage into which they had sold them. This noble act formed an appropriate conclusion to his life. He was now more than sixty-four years of age, and during more than half that period had laboured unremittingly in the arduous mission-field of the North. His biographer expatiates eloquently on his character, as exhibiting the perfect model of ascetic perfection. when elevated to the episcopal dignity he never exempted himself from the rigid discipline of the cloister. He was robed in a hair-cloth shirt by night as well as by day; he measured out, at least in earlier youth, his food and drink 1 Vita S. Anskarii, cap. xxxii. "Insuper etiam quod antea nefandum paganis videbatur, ut clocca in eadem haberetur ecclesia, consensit." Adam. Brem. I. 31. Even 2 Vita S. Anskari, cap. xxxviii. Adam. Brem. I. 31. A.D. 865. by an exact rule; he chanted a fixed number of Psalms CHAP. XI. when he rose in the morning, and when he retired to sleep at night. His charity was unbounded. A hospital His character. at Bremen testified to his care of the sick and needy, and not only did he distribute a tenth of his income to the poor, and divide amongst them any presents he might receive, but every five years he tithed his income afresh that he might be sure the poor had their proper share. Whenever he went on a visitation tour of his diocese, he made a practice of never sitting down to dinner in any place without first ordering some of the poor to be brought in, and he himself, sometimes, would wash their feet and distribute amongst them bread and meat. Such a practical exhibition of Christian love could not fail to have a gradual influence even on the rough pirates of the North, and they testified their sense of the power he wielded over them by ascribing to him many miraculous cures. But he was not one to seek a questionable distinction of this kind. "One miracle," he once said to a friend, “I would, if worthy, ask the Lord to grant me, and that is that by His grace He would make me a good man." One source, however, of disquietude troubled his last hours. In vision he believed it had been intimated to him that he was destined to win the martyr's crown'. What sin of his had deprived him of this honour? In vain one of his most intimate pupils pointed out that it had not been distinctly intimated by what death he was to die, by the flame, or the sword, or shipwreck. In vain he recalled the hardships the archbishop had undergone, and the perils which had made his life a continual martyrdom. At length, his biographer informs us, another and a last vision assured him that his fears were groundless, that no sin of his had robbed him of the wished-for crown. 1 In the vision related, so his biographer says, in the very words of Anskar himself, he declares that a voice from the highest heavens had bidden him, "Go, return hither, CHAP. XI. A.D. 865. His death. Thus comforted, he busied himself with arranging the affairs of his diocese, and after dictating a letter, in which he earnestly commended the Northern mission to the care of the Emperor, calmly expired on the 3rd of February, 865. That Anskar's success was partial, and confined to narrow limits, was the natural result of the times in which Difficulties of he lived. The whole North was in confusion. His suc his successor Rimbert. cessor Rimbert contrived to keep the flickering spark alive, A.D. 865-388. but was sadly impeded by incursions of Northmen and Slaves; nor could any permanent impression be made on the great mass of heathen barbarism till Henry I. established, in the year 934, the Mark of Schleswig as a protection for Germany from the constant inroads of the Northmen. When the work commenced so nobly by Anskar was resumed, its effect was limited, to a great extent, to the Danish mainland, while the islanders long persisted in their old rites, and still continued, in some places, to offer human sacrifices. In many places the princes continued pagan, and, when they did profess a change of sentiments in religious matters, there was no telling how long the change might last, originating, as it too often did, in low motives, and based on the temporal advantages afforded by the rival faiths. Thus Henry I. extorted from king Gorm a promise not to molest the Christians, and archbishop Unni repaired to the new Christian colony in Schleswig, hoping to produce some effect on the Danish chief. But all his efforts were of no more avail than those of Willibrord or Boniface on Radbod. The influence of his mother, the sagacious and renowned Thyra, over the Harold Blaa mind of her grim-visaged son Harold, surnamed "Blaatand" or "Black-Tooth," enabled the archbishop to obtain from that prince, when associated in the government with his father, permission to travel in every part of Denmark, and extend a knowledge of Christianity'. But it was not A.D 934. tund. 1 On Harold Blaatand, see Palgrave's Normandy and England, II. 277. Snorro Sturleson, I. 393. CHAP. XI. A.D. 941-990. till the year 972, that, after an unsuccessful war with the Emperor Otho I., Harold consented to be baptized. The presence of Otho graced his reception into the Christian Church, but the circumstances which had won his respect for the Christian faith as contrasted with his old national gods, did not augur well for his fidelity. According to Story of Porpo. an old tradition he was once visited by a priest, named Poppo, from North Friesland. At a banquet, where Poppo was a guest, the conversation turned on the then much debated question of the superiority of the old and the new religions. The Danes asserted that "the White Christ" was indeed a mighty God, but their deities were mightier, and could perform more wonderful works. Thereupon Poppo declared that Christ was the only true God, and declaimed against the deities of the country as no better than evil spirits. Harold quietly asked the missionary if he was willing in his own person to put the question to the test. Poppo declared his perfect readiness, and was kept in ward till the morrow. Harold, meanwhile, ordered a mass of iron to be heated red-hot, and then bade the champion of the new faith take it up and carry it. Poppo, we are assured, complied with the suggestion with undaunted. resolution; and the astonished king, perceiving that his hand suffered no harm, and convinced thenceforward of the superiority of the Christians' God, ordered due honour to be paid to His ministers, and declared the national deities unworthy to be compared with Him'. From this time he continued to regard 1 The story is related in Widukind, III. 65, (Pertz, v. 463), also in Thietmar, Chronicon, II. 8, and a similar story, though, as it seems, of a different Poppo, is told in Adam. Brem. II. 33; where see Dahlmann's note. In the latter case, however, it was the Christian's brave endurance rather than a miraculous exemption from pain which won Christianity with more or the monarch's attention, "liquentes |