ons,* besides women and children. The king himself soon after declared himself a convert, and was baptized; and one of the pagan temples was converted into a church, and dedicated to St. Pancras.t

We have here chiefly been considering the successful mission of the Roman emissaries, and the happy combination of events that led to their favorable reception by the Saxons. It must not, however, be supposed, that while Augustine and his colleagues were occupied in evangelizing the Saxon portion of the community, the British Christians took no part in this Christian work. It is true that their Church was heavily oppressed-yet was it not destroyed-the flame of pure Christianity burnt in many an obscure corner of the island, and many a British preacher emerged from the deep glens and woods of the island, and, like St. John in the wilderness, with no better fare than locusts and wild honey, proclaimed the joyful tidings of the Gospel, in that dark day of misery and oppression. Among the most celebrated of these bold confessors were Kentigern, St. Asaph, and St. Columba, men who hazarded their lives in those perilous times;. and through their means vast numbers of the

* Bede relates this of Paulinus.

+ It is not a little extraordinary that the last church in England that refused to throw aside the Romish usages was St. Pancras, in London.

Saxons abandoned their idolatrous worship, and embraced Christianity. So that the gross delusion which the Romanists would palm upon the world, that to Augustine and his associates belongs the entire glory of Britain's conversion, is not only absolutely false with regard to the Britons, but not true even with respect to the Saxons. This is a point that deserves well to be borne in mind, because it not only shows that the British Church existed, as a distinct and independent Church, at the time of Augustine's arrival, but that she possessed sufficient strength and vitality to extend the curtains of her tent, even in the hour of her heaviest oppression; and with all the influence that Augustine could command, by wealth, by power, and by intrigue, to establish a paramount authority over her, she yet maintained a dignified position, and from the mountains of Wales and Cornwall, the fens of Somersetshire, and the forests of Northumbria, "set up her banners for tokens" of uncompromising independence.

The use that was made by Augustine of his intrusion into the territory of the British Church, commences a new and important era in her history, and will therefore form the subject of another chapter.

In concluding the present, it will be sufficient to observe, that thus far the proof is complete, that the British is an ancient apostolical Church,

independent of all foreign jurisdiction, and totally distinct from that which Augustine planted among the Saxons. By a reference to dates also, it will appear that she was planted here at least 400 years before the Saxon invasion, and nearly 550 years before the arrival of St. Augustine,―that she was publicly recognised by the government of the country 146 years before the Church at Rome was-and that from the first moment of her existence here, to the days of Pope Gregory the Great, the bishops of Rome neither claimed nor received her submission. Popery, as a tyrannical power, urging its pretensions to supremacy or infallibility, was as yet unknown, and continued so till the pontificate of Boniface; so that for the first six hundred years of the Christian era, in vain shall we look for any resemblance to that Church, which, in after ages, filled the earth with her sorceries, and "lorded it over Christ's heritage as "universal bishop," and "as God."

Surely, "to know that the Church of Britain was coeval with the age of the Apostles, is to build our faith on grounds most solid and interesting. But to extend that proof to the individual labors of one of the Apostles, and to find ourselves indebted for the first knowledge of the greatest blessing ever conferred on mankind, to the personal zeal of the great Apostle of the Gentiles; and in this search after truth

to find further, that the father of a British prince was instrumental in the first introduction of the Gospel into Britain-that it was publicly professed and protected by a British king before the end of the second century—that a British king was the first Christian prince—that Christianity was established throughout the Roman empire by a native of Britain ;"—"these considerations, while they greatly increase our interest in the belief and service of Christianity, and augment our responsibility, may justly lead us, as Protestants, to adopt the language of Moses, • What nation is there so great, which hath God so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon him for; and what nation is there so great, that hath statutes and judgments so righteous,'—a religion so pure, a Church so apostolical, a polity so wise and equitable, and blessings so ample, so various, as God hath bestowed upon this our favored country ?"*

Let us see how far our forefathers valued and maintained these exalted privileges.

* Bishop of St. David's Tracts, p. 144.

CHAPTER IV.

"Oh that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together! for now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea."-JOв vi. 2, 3.

We are now approaching a most important epoch in the history of not only the British Church in particular, but of the Christian Church in general, when the Roman pontiffs began to unfurl the banner of universal dominion, and to set at nought even the power and rights of princes.

The mission of St. Augustine, by whatever motive undertaken, was the point of the Papal wedge, which, first insinuated into the body ecclesiastical of England, by Gregory the Great, was by his successors driven deeper and deeper, until at length, by the means of Pope Innocent III., in the thirteenth century, it so effectually destroyed the independence of the British