Footprints of the northern saints.

The year 1997 will be the 1,400th anniversary of two landmarks in the coming of Christianity to the pagan English: the arrival of St Augustine in Canterbury and the death of St Columba on Iona. Columba is the best known of the Celtic missionaries who first brought the Christian faith to Britain from Ireland; Augustine was sent by Pope Gregory the Great to found the English church. The authors of the two books look back as well as forward to see what can be learned from them for today. Both are senior churchmen: Basil Hume is Cardinal Archbishop of Westminister, and John Finney is Anglican Bishop of Pontefract in Yorkshire. Both point out that today, just as in 597 AD, evangelists have to operate in a largely non-Christian society.

Hume's little book (only 95 pages) contains his mediations on the holy men and women who brought the Gospel to northern England. A northerner himself, he feels a special sympathy with them. A spin-off from a TV series, his book is delightfully illustrated with photographs of places loved by these northern saints and by the Cardinal himself.

Hume makes profound points in a deceptively simple way. These saints, he writes, established monastic centres `not only of learning and faith, but of a central truth of that faith which can so easily be taken for granted today: the unconditional love of God for all men and women, regardless of social status or of cultural or ethnic origin'. And he relates the story of Caedmon, the illiterate cowherd who became, with the encouragement of the royally-born Abbess Hilda, England's first Christian poet.

`There was such continuity between what they believed and what they preached,' he writes, `and between what they preached and what they lived, that people immediately saw and felt the living presence of God in their midst.'

Hume describes how these pioneers introduced craftsmen from France to adorn their churches, and a choir-master from Rome. Hume writes: `In the worship of God nothing but the best is ever good enough... God speaks to us through beauty, and beauty is the correct language to use when we speak to God.' `People tend to think you are only praying when you are talking, which is a mistake,' he adds.

John Finney's book is complex--and I sometimes felt bewildered by the shifts from medieval history to modern sociology embellished with statistics. But it will reward study by anyone interested in how a modern churchman views the spiritual condition of England as we approach the millennium.

In part his book traces how Christianity came to the English largely through Celtic missionaries--courageous, adventurous, simple in lifestyle and teaching. But as the first glow of faith died down, the Roman Church, with its organization and discipline, provided the structures needed to ensure its continuance. Drawing parallels with today, he suggests the Celtic approach is now the most effective.

Research, he writes, shows that four major evangelical campaigns in England during 1994 produced small results, though they cost a lot of money. The `new evangelism', he says, eschews that kind of approach, and instead of high-powered campaigns prefers small meetings, emphasizes personal experience and nurtures a gradual process of conversion. A recent survey showed that in England 69 per cent of adults questioned came to faith in this way--usually through relationships: with family, friends or in a church.

Finney, as befits a former Anglican Officer for the Decade of Evangelism (the 1990s) and author of three other books on modern churchmanship, can turn a neat phrase. `In the supermarket of religions,' he writes, `people pick what they want from the shelves--some may collect a fundamentalism which gives a tight structure to their lives, others a "touchy-feely" self-development package, others a cult which "love-bombs" them into a greater sense of community than they have ever experienced before.' Yet these may not satisfy. He quotes the young Augustine of Hippo (not Canterbury) describing the Rome of the fourth century: `In public we were cocksure, in private we were superstitious, and everywhere void and empty.'

Hume's book is a labour of love--a testament of faith in those who brought Christianity to our forbears and of confidence in the abiding validity of their message. Finney's is a questioning book, designed to provoke thought and make us ask ourselves whether we have yet something to learn from the past amid the haste and bustle of the present.