In Iceland some traces of early Christianity, probably the result of the labours of Irish missionaries, were still remaining when it was colonized by Norwegian settlers in the ninth century; and towards the end of the tenth century successive attempts were made by a Saxon Bishop and by missionaries from Norway, to revive and deepen these impressions. The opposition of the heathen colonists was, however, of so determined a character, that it was only by the gradual conversion of the mother country, and the labours of new bands of missionaries, chiefly English and Irish, that Paganism was by degrees overcome.
From Iceland the Church made its way to Greenland, another Norwegian colony, which was converted mainly by the instrumentality of an Icelandic missionary, in the first half of the eleventh century; but this ancient Church died out in the fifteenth century. About the same time Christianity spread through the Norwegians to the Orkney, Shetland, and Faroe Islands.
The Church was first planted amongst the Lapps by Swedish missionaries in the thirteenth century, but it was not until the sixteenth and two following centuries that Christianity became the religion of the country.
Section 8. _The Churches now comprehended in European Turkey and Greece._
We look in vain in the history of the Church in Eastern Europe for the missionary activity which { 136} bears so prominent a place in the annals of Western Christendom. [Sidenote: Lack of missionary zeal in the East.] The minds of Eastern Christians were still much occupied by continued contests between the Catholic Faith and developments of already condemned heresies, and to these succeeded the scarcely less absorbing controversy about Image-breaking. Nor was there in the East the same pressing contact with Paganism, which made it in the West a political necessity no less than a religious duty at once to christianize and civilize the ever advancing hordes of heathen barbarians. [Sidenote: Conversion of Bulgaria.] The evangelization of Bulgaria was, however, begun early in the ninth century, by the carrying off of the Bishop of Adrianople and many of his flock, in a victorious inroad of the Bulgarians, A.D. 811. Half a century later the Bulgarian King Bogoris, influenced by his sister, who had been brought up a Christian at Constantinople, put himself and his country under the tuition of the Greek patriarch Photius. Soon after, becoming weary of his Eastern instructors, he applied for aid to the Western Church, and, in A.D. 867, the Pope Nicholas I. despatched two Italian Bishops and other missionaries to Bulgaria. [Sidenote: Collision between Greek and Roman missionaries.] This interference of the Roman Church, in an already occupied field of missionary labour, added considerably to the jealousy between East and West, and helped to bring about the eventual and lamentable schism. Bogoris soon after returned to his allegiance to Photius, insisted on the withdrawal of the Roman Mission, and obtained a Greek Archbishop of Bulgaria from Constantinople.