Christian, the conversion of their brethren in Ireland followed as a matter of course. The change was very gradual, and the Christianity which they at first professed was very little removed from the paganism which they abandoned. Eventually, however, idolatry became quite extinct amongst them; they founded churches more imposing in proportions than any others to be found in Ireland, and they established a ritual and liturgy similar to that which was followed at the time by the Churches of England. It is not easy to assign dates to these events, but speaking generally, we may say that the conversion of the Danes was being accomplished from the middle of the tenth to the middle of the eleventh century. Ireland was thus brought for a second time in contact with the Church of England.
We have seen how in England the missionaries from Iona were forced to retreat before the paramount influence of Rome, and how the English Church thus became subject to the Pope. It was easier, however, to banish the teachers and abolish the ceremonies of the Irish than to alter the tone which they had given to the Church. Of course this, too, would have been changed in time, if the advantage gained by the Romanists had been vigorously followed up; but the unsettled state of the country, consequent on the Danish invasions, cut off England to some extent from intercourse with the Continent; and the result was that the Anglo-Saxon Church drifted into a state of quasi-independence. In theory it acknowledged the Pope, and was in communion with the other Churches on the Continent, but practically it was independent. 'It was to an extraordinary degree a national church: national in its comprehensiveness, as well as in its exclusiveness. … The interference of foreign Churches
