Early mentions of Christianity in Britain.--King Lucius.--Origin and
spread of Christianity in Gaul.--British Bishops at
Councils.--Pelagianism.--British Bishops of London.--Fastidius.
We are to consider this evening the Christian Church in Britain, from the
earliest times at which we have any definite notice of it, to the time of
its expulsion from what had become England. It may be well to take notice
first of one or two statements of early writers about the existence of
Christianity here, at dates precisely known.
Tertullian, writing in or about the year 208, at a time when a revolt
against Severus in the north of this island gave special point to his
remark, thus describes the wide spread of the Gospel. "In all parts of
Spain, among the various nations of Gaul, in districts of Britain
inaccessible to the Romans but subdued to Christ, in all these the kingdom
and name of Christ are venerated." Origen, in 239, speaking of
polytheism, asks, "When, before the coming of Christ, did the land of
Britain hold the belief in the one God?" And again:--"The power of the
Saviour is felt even among those who are divided from our world, in
Britain." At the same time Origen gives us a timely warning against taking
his remarks to mean anything like the complete Christianisation of the
island; he tells us that among the Britons, and six other nations whom he
names, "very many have not yet heard the word of the Gospel."
The Greek historian Sozomen speaks of Constantine living in Gaul and
Britain, and there, as, he says, was universally admitted, becoming a
Christian. Both Eusebius, writing about 320, and Sozomen, about 443, tell
of an experiment made in the palace by Constantine's father Constantius,
when he governed Gaul and Britain, which shews the spread of the gospel
and the high places it had by that time reached. It has this special
interest for Britain, that York was one of the two cities at one of which
it must have taken place, Trèves being the other; for those were the two
capitals and seats of government of the whole province of the Gauls, the
one for the continental the other for the insular department of the
province. A persecution of the Christians was ordered by his three
colleagues in the empire, about the year 303. Constantius, though not
himself a Christian, did not allow much severity in his own government; a
contemporary writer, Lactantius, declares that from east to west three
savage beasts raged; everywhere but in the Gauls, that is, Gaul and
Britain. The experiment was this. He told the officers of his court, who
are spoken of as if all were Christians, though he himself was not, that
those of them who would sacrifice to demons should remain with him and
enjoy their honours: those who would not, should be banished from his
presence. He gave them time to think the matter over. They came to him
again, each with his mind made up; and some said they would sacrifice, and
some said they would not. When all had declared their intention, he told
those who would sacrifice, that if they were ready to be false to their
God, he did not see how he could trust them to be true to him. To the
others he said that such worthy servants of their God would be faithful to
their king too. The story reminds us of the sturdy old pagan king of
Mercia, Penda, who said he was quite willing that the Lindisfarne
missionaries should convert his people to Christianity, if they could;
but he gave full warning that he would not have people calling themselves
Christians and not living up to their high profession.
This story of Constantius, the father of Constantine, which I prefer to
place at York, the favourite residence of Constantius, introduces us of
course to the one well-known result of the persecution, so far as Britain
was concerned, the death of Alban at Verulam, about 305. When you go to
St. Albans, you see the local truth of the traditional details. Standing
on the narrow bridge across the little stream, you realise the blocking of
the bridge by the crowd of spectators nearly 1,600 years ago: and you can
see Alban, in his eagerness to win his martyr's crown, pushing his way
through the shallow water, rather than be delayed by the crowd on the
bridge. There is an interesting coincidence, in connection with the story
of St. Alban, which I have not seen noticed. The Gauls of Galatia, as we
have seen, were of kin to the Britons; and while the Britons were being
almost entirely saved from harm by Constantius, their Galatian cousins
were passing through a very fiery trial. The persecution of Diocletian
raged furiously in Galatia. As St. Alban is, I believe, the earliest
example of a name attached to a Christian site in this island, so the
earliest existing church in Ancyra, the capital of Gaulish Galatia, owes
its name to St. Clement, the martyr bishop of Ancyra, St. Alban's
contemporary in martyrdom.
It is unnecessary to say more on the evidence of Christianity in our
island at least from 200 onwards. But, as I have said before, there is an
entire dearth of information as to any special introduction of the new
faith. It came. It grew. How it came; who planted it; who watered it; all
is blank.
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.
In the year 358 or 359, in preparation for this Council of Rimini, a
treatise of great importance was addressed to the bishops of the British
provinces, among others. This was the treatise of Hilary, bishop of
Poitiers, on the Synods of the Catholic Faith and against the Arians. He
wrote at a very anxious time, when he was himself in exile for the faith,
and when he earnestly desired that his orthodox colleagues should take a
broad view, so as not to keep out of their communion any who could
properly be included. He addressed his treatise to the bishops of Germany,
Gaul, and the British provinces. He wrote as to men thoroughly familiar
with the very subtle heresy that was dividing the world, men who were
thoroughly sound on the point in dispute, but inclined perhaps to be
rather unflinching on a point on which he desired to make some
concession--concession in terms, not in substance. He specially urged them
not to press as vital one single phrase, not to reject as fatal another.
For, as he pointed out, each phrase could be used with a sound meaning,
either could be used unsoundly. Again, he reminded them of the difficulty
inherent in attempts to express exactly in one language a difficult
technical phrase from another. Hilary, as the first person in Gaul to
write ecclesiastical and religious treatises in Latin, instead of the then
more familiar Greek, felt this difficulty keenly; as our own Bede did when
he tried to put Caedmon's Creation song into Latin. And he warned them
against misconceiving the views of others; pointing out that while they
suspected the Oriental bishops of doubting the coequality of the Son of
God with the Father, the Oriental bishops suspected them of doubting the
distinction between the Father and the Son. Hilary had been, before his
conversion to Christianity, a highly-trained and cultured official of his
Gallo-Roman city, and he wrote this treatise with force and insight on
very difficult subjects. It was a compliment to the bishops of any church
that such a document should be addressed to them. We learn in the sequel
that Hilary's views of comprehension prevailed; but we have no means of
determining what was the share of the British in this result. I need
probably not go further in the records of British connection with
ecclesiastical events on the continent.
It may have seemed to you rather barren, this talk of Councils. But it is
in reality far from being barren talk. It shews us the representatives of
the British Church in the full swim of ecclesiastical affairs; summoned as
a matter of course to the greatest councils; addressed as a matter of
course by the greatest writer of their quarter of the world; taking their
share in the settlement of the most subtle and vital points of Christian
faith and practice. At Arles, they dealt with the question, so practical
after Diocletian's recent persecution, how men were to be re-admitted to
the Church, who in time of persecution had fallen away. They decided,
further, one of the gravest questions they could have had to decide,
whether baptism in the name of the blessed Trinity was valid baptism, even
though a schismatic had administered the rite. Their decision was against
re-baptism in such cases, a fact of which I may have time to remind you
when I speak of some of the practices of the British Church; admission by
the laying on of hands was to suffice. They also determined that Easter
must be kept everywhere on one and the same day, again a fact which
reappears very prominently in their later history. At Nicaea, they dealt
with the greatest question that ever stirred the Church of Christ, the
question of the coequal deity, the oneness of nature, of the Son with the
Father; and they laid down a rule for observing Easter, from which their
descendants 350 years later accused the Roman Church of having departed.
At Sardica they asserted the innocence of St. Athanasius; and gave
authority to Julius, Bishop of Rome, to receive appeals from a province,
if a bishop was dissatisfied with a decision of his synod. Their
descendants were too busy with the inroads of barbarians and the
subtleties of heretics, to pay much heed to the amusing exposure by the
African Church of the Popes Zosimus, Boniface, and Celestine, 417-432, for
quoting this Sardican Canon as a Canon of Nicaea, with "Julius" altered
to "Sylvester" to make the name fit the forged date. The difference
between calling it a Nicene Canon and calling it Sardican may seem little
more than a question of a right name and a wrong. But its effect was
tremendous. It added the greater part of the known world to the sphere of
influence of the Bishop of Rome. For the Sardican Canons were passed by
the Western bishops, after the Easterns had left Sardica, and could bind
at most only the West. The Canons of Nicaea were binding on the whole of
the Christian world. The sarcastic comments of the African Church, in
their letter to Celestine, at the close of the controversy, should have
had more effect in checking such proceedings than it had. At Rimini the
British upheld the coequal deity of the Son; and when the Arian Emperor
compelled the signature of a heterodox creed, the bishops of the provinces
of Gaul gathered themselves together on their way home, and re-asserted
their Catholic belief. Time after time, from Constantine onwards, the
unswerving orthodoxy of the British was the subject of special and
favourable comment. They were, as I began by saying, in the full swim of
ecclesiastical affairs; and they held a position of recognised importance
with dignity and effect.
Nor was the journeying of British Christians limited to attending
Councils. A historian writing in 420, of the time before 410, says that
from East and West people were flocking on pilgrimage to the Holy Land,
from Persia and from Britain. And Theodoret, writing of the years about
423, says that many went to the Holy Land from the extreme West,
Spaniards, and Britons, and the Galatae who dwelled between them.
We now come to a time when two natives of these islands played a large
part--one of them, a very large part, in the origin the principal part--in
the great theological controversy of the Western Church, a controversy
which touched the East too, but less pointedly. Pelagius and Coelestius
enunciated the views on the nature of man, and the operation of the grace
of God, which were combated with vehemence by two of the leading men of
the West, Augustine and Jerome. From that day to this the controversy has
never died out. When the first beginnings of the theory of
transubstantiation were heard, this Pelagian controversy divided those who
opposed the new idea. Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas, in their turn,
differed on this point, as Pelagius and Augustine did. The Franciscans and
the Dominicans took respectively the views of those two great schoolmen.
The Jesuits and the Jansenists of Louis XV's time shewed a like cleavage.
Wherever you find Calvinistic views held and combated, there you have in
fact the controversy which was started by our countrymen. Calvin declared
that every man is predestined to life or to death, from before the
foundation of the world. Pelagius maintained the freedom of will and
action of every man; his power by nature to turn and come to God; his
natural independence, so to speak.
One of the two great opponents of Pelagius, Augustine of Hippo, says that
Pelagius was a Briton. The name is Greek, and means "of the sea,"
"belonging to the sea," and hence his native name has been supposed to be
Morgan, sea-born: that, however, is only a guess. The other writers who
were his contemporaries call him a Briton. His second principal opponent,
Jerome, says that he was by birth one of the Scots, neighbours of the
Britons. This meant in those times, and for some centuries after, a native
of Ireland, whether living in Ireland or settled in the northern parts of
Britain, if any Scots were settled there so early as 370, which was about
the date of his birth. It is, however, quite as likely that Jerome is
speaking not of Pelagius, but of his companion Coelestius, whom all allow
to have been an Irishman. Whichever he means, he is not civil, as he
seldom was in controversy. He describes his opponent as "a huge fellow,
stuffed to repletion with Scotch porridge," a most disrespectful way of
speaking of porridge. Pelagius was a layman, and a monk. About 400 he went
to Rome, and he remained there till the shadow of Alaric's siege began to
fall upon the city. In those eight years he lived an exemplary life. He
urged upon others the necessity of so living, and the uselessness of
religious observance combined with laxity of life. It is easy to see how
this admirable line of teaching might be diverted, by the pressure of
controversion, into a declaration that all men could, if they pleased, so
live; that it was a matter of will, not of grace, a man's turning to God
and living as a believer should live. This was quite different from the
controversy between faith and works, which some have believed to exist
between St. Paul and St. James. It was the controversy between the
necessity of the grace of God for a man to live as he should, and the
comparative subordination of grace to the sufficient power of the will of
man. Pelagius held that if the will was not free, man was a mere puppet:
if the will was not free, man was not responsible. From this position,
which is one side of a great truth, he passed to the denial of the need
for God's grace, that is, he denied the other side of the same great
truth; or he so defined grace as to make it a mere matter of suitable
circumstances.
A great controversy on a great subject can scarcely stop short at its
first limits. Other points rise, unexpected results follow. I venture to
say that it is impossible to go on pressing one side of this great and
lasting controversy on the freedom of the will, to the disregard of the
other side, without arriving at results which shock the reverent common
sense of the devout Christian.
It is clear, for example, that when Pelagius asserted the freedom of man's
will to turn to God, he denied the Catholic doctrine of original sin, and
denying that, he denied so far the need for baptism. Indeed he taught
directly, it was in fact the key of his position, that when man sinned he
sinned after the example which Adam had set, not because he had received
the taint of sin by his descent from Adam. When pressed on this question
of the need of baptism, he allowed that there was the need, but he put it
on a different basis from that which his opponents took. It was not
necessary for salvation, he maintained; but for those who desired to
reach the full Christian heaven, a state different from that of ordinary
salvation, for them it was necessary. Entrance to that higher order of the
heavenly life was not to be obtained without baptism. When pressed again,
on the question of the need for the operation of the grace of God, he
allowed that there was that need. But he explained that when he said God's
grace must be given in order that a man might turn to God, he meant that
the man must be set in a position and under conditions and with
surroundings which rendered it natural and likely that he should so turn.
It seems clear, further, that the Pelagian view of the position and nature
of man in respect to God is inconsistent with the doctrine of the
Redemption wrought by Christ. That great sacrifice is rendered
unnecessary, if the views of Pelagius are accepted. Men could, so to
speak, turn to God and be saved without the Atonement. It is only fair to
say that the extreme view on the opposite side seems to be equally
inconsistent with this vital doctrine. If it be true that each man is
predestined absolutely to life or to death, whether before the fall of
Adam or as the immediate consequence of that fall, it would appear that
not all the Atonement of Christ can add one single soul to them that
shall be saved.
My object is to speak of Church History, not of doctrine. But this
Pelagian question is the most important fact in the history of the British
Church; and unless these few words were said to bring out the extreme
gravity of the matter in dispute, the episode would not appear to fill the
important place it does in fact fill.
With Pelagius himself we have but little to do. He spent his life far from
his native shores; he propounded his views in Rome and Carthage and
Palestine, not in London and York and Bangor. But the history of what
happened to him and his views in those distant parts is so curious--if one
may say so, so comical--and the evidence it affords of the importance of
the controversy is so great, that I must say a little about it. We shall
find in it, I think, an explanation of the course taken by the British
Church.
At Rome Pelagius met Coelestius, a Scot--that is, a native of Ireland--and
Coelestius became a devoted champion of his views, publishing them in a
more definite form than Pelagius himself adopted. These views were
condemned at a Council held at Carthage in 412. A Council at Jerusalem in
415 heard the explanations of Pelagius and did not condemn him. A Council
at Lydda in the same year fully accepted his explanations, to the great
wrath of Jerome. Carthage then took the matter up again, and requested
that Pelagius should be summoned to return to Rome, and the whole matter
be fully inquired into there, the controversy being one affecting the West
and not the East. To enable the Bishop to form an opinion on the views of
Pelagius, they sent him a copy of one of his books, with the worst
passages marked. Innocent, the Bishop of Rome, gladly received this
request, treating it as a request for his authoritative verdict, which it
was not. He replied in three letters dated January 27, 417. He began each
with a strong assertion of the supreme authority of his see, and many
expressions of his satisfaction that the controversy had been referred to
him for final decision. The Bishop was clearly not to the manner born.
These were not the sayings of unconscious dignity, of unquestionable
authority. He did protest too much. The book of Pelagius forwarded to him
he pronounced unhesitatingly to be blasphemous and dangerous; and he gave
his judgement that Pelagius, Coelestius, and all abettors of their views,
ought to be excommunicated.
Nothing could be more clear. But, unfortunately for the consistency of
official infallibility, Innocent died six weeks after writing these
letters, and Zosimus succeeded him. Coelestius and Pelagius between them
were too much for Zosimus. Coelestius came to Rome. He argued with Zosimus
that the points in dispute lay outside the limits of necessary articles of
faith, and declared his adherence to the Catholic faith in all points.
Pelagius did not come, but he wrote to Zosimus. Zosimus declared the
letter and creed of Pelagius to be thoroughly Catholic, and free from all
ambiguity; and the Pelagians to be men of unimpeachable faith, who had
been wrongly defamed. Augustine appears to imply that in his opinion
Zosimus had allowed himself to be deceived by the specious and subtle
admissions of the heretics.
Zosimus did not rest satisfied with that. He wrote to the African bishops,
vehemently upbraiding them with their readiness to condemn, and declaring
that Pelagius and his followers had never really been estranged from
Catholic truth. Far from accepting his decision or his rebukes, the
Africans, who enjoyed a successful tussle with a Pope, sent a subdeacon
with a long reply. Zosimus, in acknowledging their letter, wrote in
extravagant terms of the dignity of his own position as the supreme judge
of religious appeals, and, quaintly enough, hinted at the possibility of
reconsidering his decision. The Africans did not wait. They met in synod,
214 bishops or more, and passed nine canons, anathematizing the Pelagian
views. The Emperors Honorius and Theodosius banished Pelagius and
Coelestius from Rome. What was Pope Zosimus to do, under these singularly
trying circumstances? These men, thus banished from Rome, he had declared
to be men of unimpeachable faith, wrongly defamed, never estranged from
Catholic truth. He dealt with the matter in this way. He wrote a circular
letter, declaring that the Popes inherit from St. Peter a divine authority
equal to that of St. Peter, derived from the power which our Lord bestowed
on him; so that no one can question the Pope's decision. He then proceeded
to censure, as contrary to the Catholic faith, the tenets of Pelagius and
Coelestius, specially censuring some of Pelagius's comments on St. Paul
which had been laid before him since his former decision. He ordered all
bishops, in the churches acknowledging his authority, to subscribe to the
terms of his letter on pain of deprivation. In Italy itself, Rome's own
Italy, eighteen bishops protested against this change of front, and were
deprived of their sees under the authority of the civil power.
Of course all men, however exalted their position, are liable to these
sudden changes, whether pressed by external circumstances or impelled by
inward conviction. And men who have themselves known what it is to be
tried in any such way, on however humble a scale, are inclined rather to
feel with them than sharply to condemn them; especially when, as in this
case, their second thoughts are best. But if they are to be treated thus,
with kindly judgement not unmixed with sympathy, they must not herald
their change of view with statements that they have a divine authority,
equal to that of St. Peter, and that no one can question their
contradictory decisions.
To come nearer home after this long digression, which yet is not really a
digression from the British point of view. The views of Pelagius had
considerable success in Gaul, and gave a good deal of trouble there. In
Britain their success was alarmingly great. The bishops and clergy were
unable to make head against the wave of heresy. Whether there was
anything, in the independence of the position claimed by Pelagius for man,
which specially appealed to the nature of the Britons and their Celtic
congeners; anything in the claim of each individual to be good enough in
himself, if he pleases to be good enough; which harmonised with the
opinion those races had--dare I say have?--of themselves; these are
questions to which I cannot venture to give an answer. There the fact
remains, that Pelagianism did appeal very strongly to the temperament of
those who then dwelt in our land. And coupled with this is the fact, that,
however orthodox the clergy and bishops might be, and however well versed
in the great controversy in which in the previous century they had played
their part, the subtleties of this new controversy, initiated as it was by
one of their own or kindred race, springing up from their own nature and
appealing to the nature of their people, were too much for them--as indeed
they had been for Pope Zosimus. Agricola was the name of the man who acted
as the apostle of the Pelagians in the home regions, the son, we are told,
of a bishop of Pelagian views.
What our predecessors may have lacked in subtlety, they more than made up
in practical common sense. If they could not grapple with the heresy
themselves, they sent for those who could. They applied to their nearest
ecclesiastical neighbour, the Church of Gaul, to which no doubt they
looked partly as their mother and partly as their elder sister. The
account of their application and the response it met with comes to us from
a life of Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, the person chiefly concerned,
written by special request forty years after his death by an eminent
person, and published on the request of the then Bishop of Auxerre. When
the application reached the heads of the Gallican Church, a numerous synod
was called together, and Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, and Lupus, Bishop of
Troyes, were appointed to visit Britain. The manner of treating the heresy
had been forced upon the attention of the Gallican prelates by their own
experiences. At that very time semi-Pelagianism was rife in the south of
Gaul, about Marseilles, and it continued in force there for a long time,
another fellow-countryman of ours, Faustus the Briton, imbuing even the
famous monastery of Lérins with this modified form of the heresy. To
concert measures for dealing with the south of Gaul, Prosper of Aquitaine,
a monk and probably a layman, afterwards secretary to Pope Leo the Great,
went to Rome about two years after this to consult the Pope, and from
Celestine he no doubt heard what he repeated or embellished twenty-five
years later. He tells us that the Pope took pains to keep the "Roman
island" Catholic, referring of course to the long occupation of Britain by
the Roman troops, at this time abandoned. In another passage, whose
genuineness has been questioned, Prosper says that Celestine sent Germanus
in his own stead to Britain. Prosper was certainly in a position to
receive from the best-informed source an account of what was done; but the
Gallican Church appears to have known nothing of this sending of Germanus
by Celestine. Prosper's inclination to magnify the importance of the Popes
has been referred to already[29]; and we may take it as certain that if
such an unparalleled step as going himself or sending some one in his
stead, a forecast of Gregory's action, had been attempted or taken by the
Pope, we should have heard of it in the records of Gaul or in the life of
Germanus. The successor of Germanus would have known of it. That Celestine
had known at the time what was going on, and that he felt and probably
expressed warm approval, we may regard as certain too. I must defer, to an
opportunity in my third lecture, remarks which I wish to make on what may
seem an ungenerous questioning of these assertions of benefits conferred
by Rome.
In 429, then, the Gallican prelates came to Britain. They had a very rough
crossing, and a story, rejected with scorn by quite modern writers, is
told of a miracle wrought by Germanus. He stilled the storm by pouring oil
upon the sea in the name of the Trinity. We now know that if they had oil
on board, and knew how to use it, the stilling of the waves was done;
without miracle, but with not the less earnest trust in the watchful care
of God[30].
It was on this journey to Britain that Germanus and Lupus saw at Nanterre
a little girl aged seven, and prophesied great things of her. Her name was
Genofeva, and she became the famous Ste. Geneviève. In these days when
people coquet with the principles of revolution and shut their eyes to its
realities, it may be well to add that her coffin of silver and gold was
sold in 1793, and her body burned on the Place de Grève, by public decree.
When they got to work in Britain, they proceeded on a definite plan. Some
sixty or seventy years before, Hilary, the Bishop of Poitiers, dealing in
Gaul with the great heresy which preceded this, had found it of great
service to go about from place to place and collect in different parts
small assemblies of the bishops, for free discussion and mutual
explanation. He found that misunderstandings were in this way, better than
in any other, got rid of, and differences of opinion were reduced to a
minimum. Germanus and Lupus dealt with the people of Britain as their
predecessor had dealt with the bishops of Gaul. They went all over,
discussing the great question with the people whom they found. They
preached in the churches, they addressed the people on the highroads, they
sought for them in the fields, and followed them up bypaths. It is clear
that the visitors from Gaul could speak to the people, both in town and in
country, in their own tongue, or in a tongue well understood by them. No
doubt the native speech of Gaul and that of Britain were still so closely
akin that no serious difficulty was felt in this respect. They met with
success so great that the leaders on the other side were forced to take
action. They felt, so the biographer tells us, not that his is likely to
be convincing evidence as to their feelings, that they must run the risk
of defeat rather than seem by silence to give up the cause. They
undertook to dispute with the Gallicans in public. The biographer is not
an impartial chronicler. The Pelagians came to the disputation with many
outward signs of pomp and wealth, richly dressed, and attended by a crowd
of supporters. Why should the biographer thus indicate that the Pelagian
heresy was specially rife among great and wealthy and popular people?
Perhaps it may be the case, that, with imperfectly civilised people, a
position of wealth and distinction tends to make men less humble in their
view of the need of the grace of God. Besides the principals, we are told
that immense numbers of people came to hear the dispute, bringing with
them their wives and children; coming, in the important phrase of the
biographer, to play the part of spectator and judge. That is the first
note we have of the function of the laity in religious disputes in this
land of ours. It is a pregnant hint. The disputants were now face to face.
On one side divine authority, on the other human presumption; on one side
faith, on the other perfidy; on one side Christ, on the other Pelagius.
The description is Constantius's, not mine. The bishops set the Pelagians
to begin, and a weary business the Pelagians made of it. Then their turn
came. They poured forth torrents of eloquence, apostolical and evangelical
thunders. They quoted the scriptures. The opponents had nothing to say.
The people, to whose arbitration it was put, scarce could keep their hands
off them; the decision was given by acclamation, against the Pelagians.
Where did this take place? Certainly not far from Verulam, for Constantius
goes on to say that the bishops hastened to the shrine of St. Alban, which
at the request of Germanus was opened, that he might deposit there some
relics which he had brought with him. He took away, in exchange, some
earth from the actual spot of the martyrdom. Presumably the disputation
took place somewhere near London, on the road to St. Albans; perhaps at
Verulam itself.
The British Church was thus saved from enemies within; but enemies without
soon had it by the throat. There were no Roman troops to guard the
northern wall, to guard the Saxon shore. The Roman troops had gone, and
with them the flower of the British youth[31]. From north and east the
barbarians poured in upon the Britons, pell mell. Gildas, crying bitter
tears, and using bitter ink, in his Welsh monastery, tells us of the
weakness and the follies of the British and their kings, of the cruelties
of the barbarous folk. We see in his pages the smoke of burned churches,
the blood of murdered Christians. Matthew of Westminster tells us that the
churches that were burned had the happier fate. In thirty cases churches
were saved and made into heathen temples, the altars polluted with pagan
sacrifice. But the Saxons and Angles made way so slowly that it is
certain they met with a much sturdier opposition than Gildas credits his
countrymen with. Strive as they would, however, and did, the Britons
gradually gave way. Thus, and thus only, can we fill the dreary void in
British history, which we know as the first hundred and fifty years of the
Making of England.
This brings us very near to the end of our period. Not of our subject; for
in my concluding lecture I have to deal--with sad scantness--with the
Christian Church in other parts of these islands, before and at the coming
of Augustine.
In the twenty years immediately preceding the arrival of Augustine, the
long line of British Bishops of London came to an end. It has been a
subject of remark, and of moralising, that Theonus, the last bishop, lost
heart and fled just when the chance was coming for which it is presumed
that he had been waiting, the actual beginning of the conversion of the
English. But remarks of this character are misplaced; they disregard--or
are ignorant of--the political facts of the time. Theonus of London was a
British bishop in a British city. London had not fallen. Most difficult of
access in the then state of land and water, of marsh and mud, whether
from north or south or east or west, it held out to the last. The earliest
date that can be assigned to its fall is about the year 568, and a date so
early as that is only given to account for Ethelbert's being able to take
his army from Kent to Wimbledon without interruption from London. But for
that, and there may be other explanations of it, it is quite possible to
put the taking of London by the East Saxons a few years later. But it is
not necessary for our purpose. The date of the flight of Theonus has been
said to be 586. It is probable that this is about the date of Ethelbert's
vigorous action northwards, by which he made himself over-lord of his East
Saxon neighbours and of London their most recent conquest, which they
appear not to have occupied for some years after its fall. The political
and administrative changes, due to this expansion of the power of Kent,
may well have made ruined London no longer a possible place of residence,
and of work, for a Christian Briton so prominent in position and office as
the Bishop of London must always have been. It seems probable that Matthew
of Westminster was not far wrong when he wrote that in 586 Theonus took
with him the relics of the saints, and such of the ordained clergy as had
survived the perils, and retired to Wales. Others, he says, fled further,
to the continental Britain. Thadioc of York, he adds, went at the same
time. In some parts, as for instance about Glastonbury, the British
Christians remained undisturbed by the English for sixty or seventy years
longer[32].
A year or two ago, when we set up the list of Bishops of London in the
south aisle here, there was at first an inclination in some quarters to
criticise the decision at which we arrived as to the bishops of the
British period. But the explanations kindly given by those who approved
our action soon put a stop to that. There is a list of Archbishops of
London before Augustine's time, beginning about the year 180 and ending
with Theonus, whose date may be put about 580. In those four centuries,
sixteen names are given, a number clearly insufficient for 400 years. The
names are specially insufficient in the later part of the time, only four
being given between 314 and 580. This is rather in favour of the four
names being real; for it is evident that if people were inventing names,
they might as well have invented twenty, while they were about it, instead
of only four, for 260 years[33].
The traditions of York do not supply any long list of bishops, continuous
or not. Eborius, at Arles in 314, is the first named. And there are only
three others, each of whom has a date with Matthew of Westminster, Sampson
507, Piran 522, Thadioc 586. York probably fell as early as the date
assigned to Sampson; who, by the way, was created Archbishop of York by
the forgers of the twelfth century, to back up an ecclesiastical claim on
the continent.
The decision at which we arrived in respect of the London list was to give
one name only, that of Restitutus, putting a row of dots above him and
below him, to shew that there were British bishops before him, probably
very few, and British bishops after him, certainly many. Restitutus signed
the decrees of the Council of Arles, as Bishop of London, in the year 314.
That is sure ground; and in a list of bishops, set up officially in the
Cathedral Church, nothing less solid than sure ground should be taken.
As to the British Bishops of London being styled archbishops, there is no
evidence for it. Our famous Dean Ralph (A. D. 1181), no mean historian,
left on record his view that there were three archbishoprics[34] in
Britain--London, York, and Caerleon--which last, he said, corresponded to
St. David's. Whether Gregory had some information that has since been
lost, respecting the ecclesiastical arrangements which had existed here,
we cannot say; but it is a curious coincidence, explicable perhaps by the
mere importance of the two places, that he directed Augustine to make
arrangements for a metropolitan at London, with twelve suffragans, and a
metropolitan at York with twelve suffragans. The complete arrangements, as
set out by Gregory when he sent an additional supply of missionaries to
Augustine, of whom Mellitus was one, were as follows. Augustine was told
to ordain in various places twelve bishops, to be subject to his control,
so that London should for the future be a metropolitan see; and it appears
that Gregory contemplated Augustine's occupying as a matter of course the
position of Bishop of London[35]. He was to ordain and send to York a
suitable bishop, who should in like manner ordain twelve bishops and
become the metropolitan. The northern metropolitan was to be under
Augustine's jurisdiction; but after Augustine's death he was to be
independent of London, and for the future the metropolitan who was senior
in consecration was to have precedence[36]. This takes no account of the
bishops existing in what we call Wales and Cornwall. Gregory specially
declared that those bishops, then at least seven in number, were subject
to Augustine. It is impossible that these seven were to be included among
the twelve suffragans of London, for with Rochester and Canterbury that
would leave only three bishops for the whole of the rest of the south of
England. That the tradition of British times, and a part of the scheme
actually laid down by Gregory, should be carried out in our time, would be
I think an excellent thing. An Archbishop of London, with some half-dozen
suffragans, with dioceses and diocesan rank, in districts of this great
wilderness of houses, would be a solution of some very difficult problems.
There were two names in the traditional list which it was thought we might
at least have included along with Restitutus. One was that of the last on
the list, Theonus. But the evidence for him, though quite sufficient for
ordinary purposes, was not of the highest order. The other was that of
Fastidius, the last but two on the list. His date--for he was a real and
well-known man--was much earlier than that position would indicate, for he
was described, among illustrious men, by a writer who lived a full
century before Theonus, the last on the list. This writer, Gennadius of
Marseilles, informs us that Fastidius was a British bishop. One important
manuscript has, in place of this, "Fastidius a Briton," as if his being a
bishop was not certain. In any case there is nothing to connect him with
the bishopric of London, or with London, beyond the natural assignment to
the most important position of a man not specially assigned by the
earliest historian. His date is probably about 430 to 450.
This Fastidius is the only writer of the British Church, besides Pelagius
if we can properly reckon him as one, whose work has come down to us. I do
not know that the early British Christians produced any writers other than
Fastidius and Pelagius. Had their records not been destroyed, it might
well have been that many a manuscript work of British bishops would have
remained till the middle ages and been now in print. Fastidius and Gildas
are sufficient evidence of the literary tendencies of the British mind.
Indeed, we may credit the Britons of the time of Gildas with having been
laborious students, those, at least, who were settled in Wales. Their
Celtic cousins had a passion for writing.
We find Gennadius of Marseilles testifying to the soundness of the
doctrine of Fastidius, and its worthiness of God. But who shall testify to
the soundness of Gennadius? He was a semi-Pelagian; and so it appears was
Fastidius, for whose soundness he vouches. Fastidius distinctly quotes
from Pelagius, though without mentioning him by name. He uses the phrase
which is the keynote of Pelagianism, man sinned "after the example of
Adam;" and he describes the manner in which saints should pray, in words
which cannot be independent of Pelagius's words on that subject.
Apart from their heretical tendency, the works or work of Fastidius may be
taken as containing excellent teaching. He naturally presses most the
practical side, the necessity of a good life. "Our Lord said," he shrewdly
reminds the reader, "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments;
He did not say keep faith only. For if faith is all that is required, it
is too much to say that the commandments must be kept. Far be it from me
to suppose, that my Lord said too much on any point." One interesting
allusion to the state of the country in his time, the Christian
settlements here and there in the midst of a heathen population, it may be
the Romano-Briton among the unmixed Britons, occurs in a passage full of
practical teaching:--"It is the will of God that His people should be
holy, and free from all stain of unrighteousness; so righteous, so
merciful, so pure, so unspotted from the world, so single-hearted, that
the heathen should find in them no fault, but should say in wonder,
Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, and the people whom He hath
chosen for His own inheritance."