Whatever variety of form the heathendom of the Anglosaxons may have assumed in different districts, we are justified in asserting that a sacerdotal class existed, and that there were different grades of rank within it. We hear of priests, and of chief priests; and it is not unnatural to conclude that to the latter some pre-eminence in dignity, if not in power, was conceded over their less-distinguished colleagues. Similarly, the necessities of internal government and regulation, and the analogy of secular administration, had gradually supplied the Christian communities with a well-organized system of hierarchy, which commencing with the lower ministerial functions, passed upward through the presbyterate, the episcopal and metropolitan ordinations, and found its culminating point and completion in the patriarchates of the eastern and western churches. The paganism of the Old World, which admitted the participation of different classes in the public rites of religion, if it did not cause, could at least easily reconc............