The Biography of the Bible

was discovered to possess such a native power of putting into verse the Biblical stories which he heard that the Abbess Hilda took him into the order and had him instructed until he was able to paraphrase in Anglo-Saxon verse a large part of the Vulgate as it was translated for him by the other monks. Of his work but a single manuscript remains, containing parts of Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel, together with original poems on the fall of the Angels and the temptation of Man. These fragments show Saint Hilda's cowherd to have well deserved her patronage.

The literary movement thus begun was continued in the religious poetry of the Northumbrian Cynewulf in the eighth century, during which England also produced one of the foremost scholars of the day in the person of the great Alcuin (Ealhwine in Anglo-Saxon). Invited to France by Charlemagne, Alcuin as abbot of Tours became the center of a new religio-literary movement in that country.

Charlemagne was an impatient Christian. When the continental Saxons scoffed at his religion, he gave them the choice of baptism or death, justifying his intolerance, as Augustine had done, by Christ's words, "Constrain them to come in" (Luke xiv. 23) in his parable of the slighted invitation.

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