troduced from Rome by Saint Augustine, and he will be so good as to consider the earliest English Papists as little better than dissenters. further inferences which he is to draw will be pointed out to him as the work proceeds.

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PRIG'S BEDE.

INTRODUCTION.

BEFORE introducing the reader to the text of the Venerable Bede, it is well to premise that, being a Romanist historian, whatever he says must be received with reserve and caution. Unquestionably, Bede is the standard writer about the peoples and periods of which he treats. The modern historian, therefore, must make his writings the foundation of his work. when dealing with this part of British history; but it cannot be too strongly insisted upon that while he honestly, industriously, and reverently studies the priceless words of this great

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authority, he must give credence to exactly so much as he may find convenient, and to no more. Contenting myself with these few prefatory remarks, I shall now proceed to present my readers with the Text of Bede, leaving it to speak for itself, and the student to form his own opinions thereon.

Lucius, king of Britain, writing to Pope Eleutherius, desired to be made a Christian.

In the year of our Lord's incarnation 156, Marcus Antonius Verus, the fourteenth from Augustus, was made Emperor, together with his brother, Aurelius Commodus. In their time, whilst Eleutherius, a holy man, presided

over the Roman Church, Lucius, king of the Britons, sent a letter to him, entreating, that by his command he might be made a Christian. He soon obtained the object of his pious request.1

1 The student will not fail to observe that this important sentence describes the foundation of the British Church, and consequently that of our glorious mother, the Established Church of England, the Church which was destined to make such a gallant stand against the attempted encroachments of Vaticanism.

Let not the reader for one moment lose sight of the fact that the Church of England is no child of the comparatively modern church introduced by St. Augustine, but the

lineal and only descendant of the grand old British Church, founded by Lucius, king of the Britons, in the year 156, a time when many were living whose fathers had seen and spoken to the very Apostles themselves. While Romanists boast of the antiquity of their Church, we may proudly point to the evidence of their own writer, Bede, to prove that our church was founded by Lucius only a century and a half after Christ, whereas theirs, however ancient it may be in Rome, is but a modern exotic in this country. This shows the advantage of going to the fountain-head in search of history.

A neophyte in documental research might, for a moment, be confused by the apparent inconsistency of the founder of the Church of England