icit faith despite hardships (pp. 50-55). But the real threat to the survival of the Church emerges, not in the accounts of physical danger to practicing Christians, but in the accounts of various spiritual heresies visited on England over the years.
Thus in Book I Bede discusses the Arian heresy and the Pelagian heresy, only to be followed by the spiritual triumph and spiritual authority of Augustine (pp. 74-100). Augustine's preaching to the British bishops is given the weight of what might be called physical evidence in the account in Book II of Augustine's working of a miracle, as if in celebration of the authority of the preachments. When even that does not persuade the bishops and priests who "refused to preach to the English the way of life," the massacre of the "faithless Britons" by a secular king, Ethelfrid, results (pp. 104-7). Bede's account of the "battle" takes little account of the slaughter; his point seems to be to show that spiritual or ecclesiastical failures have temporal consequences.
The progression of the History through to Bede's day is very much a recitation of the victories and setbacks of the church in England, as a series of faithful kings establish good reigns in Britain, and as a series of faithful bishops and archbishops attempt to establish some uniformity of worship and spiritual life there. Meanwhile, of course, faithless kings and princes challenge these efforts from time to time. The faithful kings and bishops engage in righteous battle or perform assorted miracles to cement their spiritual hold on Britain; the faithless on the other hand "devastate" the region "with plundering and slaughter" (p. 230). The significance of Bede's characterization of the important figures of British ecclesiastical history is that it reinforces the case he makes for his view of how the Church should exercise its authority and how Catholics should live their spiritual lives throughout Britain. The underlyi...