The few books of the classical world then within reach of the student opened to the young Saxon views of human duties and human responsibilities utterly distinct from the unmeaning ceremonials and fleshly mortifications in which even the higher theology of that day placed the elements of virtue.

He smiled in scorn when some Dane, whose life had been passed in the alternate drunkenness of wine and of blood, thought he had opened the gates of heaven by bequeathing lands gained by a robber's sword, to pamper the lazy sloth of some fifty monks.

If those monks had presumed to question his own actions, his disdain would have been mixed with simple wonder that men so besotted in ignorance, and who could not construe the Latin of the very prayers they pattered, should presume to be the judges of educated men.

It is possible--for his nature was earnest--that a pure and enlightened clergy, that even a clergy, though defective in life, zealous in duty and cultivated in mind,--such a clergy as Alfred sought to found, and as Lanfranc endeavoured (not without some success) to teach--would have bowed his strong sense to that grand and subtle truth which dwells in spiritual authority.

But as it was, he stood aloof from the rude superstition of his age, and early in life made himself the arbiter of his own conscience.