You are, of course, familiar with the story that Lucius, a British king, requested Eleutherus, or Eleutherius, Bishop of Rome 171 to 185, to send some one to teach his people Christianity, of which he had himself some knowledge. The documents which profess to be the letters connected with this request are unskilful forgeries. A note is appended to the name of Eleutherus in the Catalogue of Roman Pontiffs to the effect that “he received a letter from Lucius, a British king, requesting that he might be made a Christian.” But this is a later addition, for it does not exist in the earlier catalogue, which was itself written nearly 200 years after the supposed event. It is an addition of the kind of which we have, alas! so many examples at Rome and elsewhere, but especially and above all at Rome: a statement inserted in later times for the sake of magnifying the claims to ecclesiastical authority, and affording evidence, in an uncritical age, of their recognition by former generations. The credit of this fallacious insertion has rather unkindly, but perhaps not unjustly, been assigned to Prosper of Aquitaine, of whom we shall hear again[25]. It is quite in his style.

It is natural to say, and many of us no doubt have said it, that there is no improbability in the statement that such an application was made. I used to think so, but each further investigation makes the improbability seem more real. Neither if we look to the Church of Rome, at the time, nor if we look to the state of Gaul, shall we find encouragement for a story, which in itself it would be very pleasant to believe of our British predecessors. It might be thought not unlikely that some Christian, escaping from the terrible persecutions just then enacted at Lyons and Vienne, had fled northwards through lands all pagan, and had reached pagan Britain. But if that were so, he would scarcely tell Lucius to send to Rome. There were Christians in Southern Gaul: send to them. The man’s allegiance to a centre would be to Asia Minor, not to Rome. The Bishops of Rome, too, were not particularly strong men in early times, nor men of much distinction. The really great men were in the East; were in Africa; anywhere but Rome. The secular world was still ruled from the pagan city of Rome; but ecclesiastical Rome was not in a large way as yet: it did not as yet live up to its natural position. Rome was marked out by its supreme secular position to be the centre of the Western Church; and it had, besides, the great ecclesiastical claim of its origin. It was the most ancient of the Churches of the West. It alone could stand the test, stated so convincingly by Tertullian, of Apostolical foundation; for it, and it alone in the West, had a letter that could be read in its churches from the Apostle who founded it. Rome, as Tertullian says, had a letter written by its founder, equal in this supreme respect, as he puts it, to Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, Ephesus. It had also the exceptional happiness, as Tertullian justly describes it, of being the scene of the martyrdom of its founder, St. Paul; and of that other great Apostle who found a grave there, St. Peter; to which Tertullian adds the miracle of St. John at the Latin gate. The force of the claim which its secular position gave to it was fully and justly recognised by the Second General Council, in terms which are a permanent stumbling-block to the mediaeval claims of Rome. The Fathers, assembled in 381, declared that the see of Constantinople should rank next in precedence to the see of Rome, on the ground that Constantinople, now the seat of empire, was ‘new Rome;’ taking ecclesiastical rank from its secular position, as Rome itself had done. In the early times of which we are now speaking, we do not find even the germ of the mediaeval theory of Roman supremacy; and the men who filled the office of Bishop of Rome were not men of mark enough to work any approach to such a theory, or to fix upon them the eyes of a far-off barbarian chief. It was either this Eleutherus, or his successor Victor, who was all but taken in to recognise Montanism, as indeed Zosimus was taken in, 250 years later, by the superior subtlety of our countryman, the Briton Pelagius. Eleutherus, or Victor, was only saved from this grave mistake by the advice of an Oriental heretic.

But apart from all such considerations, which I mention historically and not polemically, I see no reason why Britons should go so far afield if they wished to learn of Christ. With Gaul so close at hand, its people so near of kin, its government so identical with theirs, the Britons would hear of Christianity, would learn Christianity, from and through Gaul, and would look to Gaul, not Italy. But if we look to the state of Gaul in the time to which this British king is assigned, we shall see that it was in the very highest degree improbable that he should aim at making his people Christians. It was a time of terrible trial, with everything to be lost by becoming Christian. What sort of Christian hero was this, in the year 175 or 180, who desired to lead his nation to a change in their religion, that they might court the barbarous tortures inflicted by their kinsfolk on all of the Christian name at this exact conjuncture?

The new faith was planted in the south of Gaul comparatively early, but it spread northwards very slowly. The first congregations, those of Lyons and Vienne, were formed by Christians from Asia Minor, where some of them had known Polycarp, who was a pupil of St. John. Soon after the foundation of this infant Church, the great persecution of its members took place, about the year 175, when Eleutherus was bishop of Rome. The details of the persecution are so well known, through the letter which the survivors wrote—not to Rome, but to their parent Church and personal friends in Asia and Phrygia,—a letter preserved to us by the Greek historian Eusebius, that I think they have given a wrong impression as to the extent of the Christian Church in Gaul towards the end of the second century[26]. The Christians at Lyons and Vienne were a small and isolated flock, not however isolated as foreigners speaking a strange tongue, for Irenaeus, who was one of them, mentions his daily use of the Gallic language. They seem to have been almost the only Christians known in Gaul. The ignorance of the practices of Christianity was so great among the Gauls, that they were accused of crimes such as they did not believe any man committed,—banquets of Thyestes, incests of Oedipus. That was in the year 175. Lyons was a wonderful water-centre. An examination of a good map will surprise even those who know France fairly well. North, south, east, and west, there were water-ways. Even Eusebius, writing far away in the East, remarked on this; and you know how tantalisingly silent early historians are as a rule about such things. And yet Christianity spread exceedingly slowly. Gregory of Tours, whose inclination would not be to make little of the early Church in Gaul, seeing that he was a Gallo-Roman of lofty lineage, and not a newfangled Frank, quotes with complete assent the statement that a great missionary effort had to be made in Gaul about the year 250 to spread Christianity; and that so late as that, missionary bishops had to be sent—neither he nor his authority says by whom—to seven cities and districts, in most of which, we should otherwise have supposed, Christianity in its full form had for many years existed. These were Tours, Arles, Narbonne, Toulouse, Paris, Auvergne, and Limoges[27]. With the exception of Paris, that does not carry us very far towards Britain, even in the middle of the third century. There is not any evidence, and without evidence it would be unreasonable to imagine so improbable a thing, that far-away Britain was in advance of Gaul by decades of Christian years. Gregory of Tours, however, was not completely informed. We may probably accept, as having some historical foundation, the story that some of those who escaped from the persecution at Lyons did push up northwards and teach Christianity at Autun, Dijon, and Langres. The last-named town was well up on one of the routes to Britain. It was the death-place of Abbot Ceolfrid on his journey towards Rome in 716.

If we look to the traditional dates of the establishment of bishoprics in the parts of Gaul which face the Britannic isles, we shall find that even tradition does not assign to them any very early origin. Beginning with the archdiocese of Rouen, and bearing in mind that it is not the way of ecclesiastical traditions to err on the side of lateness, the first dated bishops in the several dioceses are as follows. The third bishop of Rouen, or, as some count, the second, was at Arles in 314. The third bishop of Bayeux dates 458-65. The second bishop of Avranches, 511. The second bishop of Evreux, 450-90. The fifth bishop of Séez, 500. The first bishop of Lisieux whose name is recorded, 538. The first bishop of Coutances, about 475. As three British bishops were at Arles in 314, when only one of these seven bishoprics was in existence, the antiquity and completeness of our island Church compares very favourably with that of the archdiocese of Rouen. Passing to the archdiocese of Cambray, the first bishop of Cambray died in 540; the first bishop of Tournay is dated 297; the other bishoprics are late. In the archdiocese of Rheims, the two first bishops of Rheims, paired together, are assigned to 290; the two first bishops of Soissons were the same pair as those of Rheims; the first bishop of Lâon was at Orleans in 549; Beauvais, 250; Châlons about 280; the second bishop of Amiens, 346; the ninth of Senlis, 511; the second of Boulogne, 552. Here, again, our three bishops at Arles in 314 compare favourably with this great archdiocese, which was in the most accessible part of Gaul for the insular Britons.

Unless we are prepared to believe that our island was Christianised by some influence apart from Gaul, and reaching us through some route other than that of Gaul—and I do not see any evidence for anything of the kind—we must, I think, take it that our position was that of younger sister to the Church in Gaul. All the indications point in that direction. It is most cruel that the British history has all been blotted out, by the severity of the English conquest and the barbarity of the bordering tribes. In Gaul, the history was not blotted out by the successful invasion of the Franks. Gregory of Tours died in the year 594, of which we have said so much. He was a Gallo-Roman, one of the race overrun by the Franks; and yet he writes the history of the Franks, putting on record an immense amount of information about the earlier Gaulish times—not very trustworthy, it is true. But for the sack of London by the East Saxons, of which I shall have to speak later, we might have had a history that would solve all our doubts, from a Brito-Roman Bishop of London, exactly contemporary with Gregory of Tours. Failing all such record, we must read the signs for ourselves, and they point in the direction I have described. They make us a younger sister, not very much younger, of the Church of Gaul—a Church founded from Ephesus—Oriental in its origin, not Western. I may, perhaps, have time to indicate in my concluding lecture some points which shew the non-Western connection of the British Church.

The probability is that from Tertullian’s time onwards the faith spread and grew here quietly. The Christian Church certainly took to itself an outward form. Bishops were appointed in central places. By the year 314—that is, in one century of growth—it appears that we had in Britain a Christian Church as fully equipped as any corresponding area of the Continent at that time was. What is the evidence for this?

At the Council of Arles, a. d. 314, three British bishops were present. Two of them are described as of the province of Britain; the third is not so described. All are included among the bishops of the Galliae, that is, of the province of the Roman Empire so called. Three may not sound a large number, but as a question of proportion it is in fact large[28]. Thirty-two or thirty-three bishops, in all, signed the decrees of the Council. Of these, seven were from Italy and the islands, ten from Africa, eleven from what we call France, three from Britain, and two from elsewhere. The large number of bishops from Africa will surprise no one who knows the prominence of the African Church in the early times, the large number of its bishoprics, the area which it covered. It was the birthplace and home of Latin Christianity, while the Roman Church was still practically a Greek Church. In Africa, not in Italy, the Latin version of the Scriptures was first made.

The principal French bishoprics represented at Arles were Marseilles, Vienne, Lyons, Bordeaux, Trèves, Rheims, and Rouen. In such company it is quite sufficient for us to find York and London, and a see which is understood to be Caerleon; the three bishops thus representing the whole of the island except Caledonia, and occupying what may well have been regarded as the three metropolitical sees, north, south, and west. This coincided fairly well with the re-arrangement of the Roman province of Britain shortly before this time. I venture to suggest that the dates I gave just now, of the foundation of bishoprics in Belgic Gaul, appear to shew some considerable advance in the years about 280, and that from 260 to 280 may have seen the commencement of British episcopacy.

The records of the signatures at the Council of Nicaea in 325 are, as is well known, not in such a state as to enable us to say that British bishops were present. But considering their presence at Arles, the first of the Councils, and the interest of Constantine in Britain and his intimate local knowledge of its circumstances; considering, too, the very wide sweep of his invitations to the Council; it is practically certain that we were represented there. At the Council of Sardica, in 347, only the names of the bishops are given, not their sees. But fortunately the names of the bishops are grouped in provinces. The province of the Gauls—that is, Gaul and Britain—had thirty-three bishops present. I think that any one who has studied the dates of the foundation of the French bishoprics will allow that to make up thirty-three bishops in 347, several British bishops must have been included. At the Council of Rimini, in 359, there were so many British bishops present that three were singled out from the rest of their countrymen as being so poor that they accepted the Emperor’s bounty for their daily support, declining a collection made for their expenses among their brother bishops. The others, who could do without the Imperial allowance, refused it as unbecoming.