CHaiSTIAN REMAINS IN CORNWALL, ANTERIOR TO THE 

 MISSION OF SAINT AUGUSTINE TO KENT. 



By Rev. W. S. LACH-SZYRMA, M.A. 



There is one boast tliat we in Cornwall can make, i.e., that 

 our Christianity is anterior in a continuous form to that of any 

 other county of England. For one thousand four hundred 

 years, or thereabouts, it would seem that a majority of the 

 Cornish people have been professing Christians. This can be 

 said of no other county, unless it be Devon, which possibly shared 

 Cornwall's continuous Christianity from an early date, though 

 the evidences of it are not so clear as in the case of West 

 Cornwall. 



It should be remembered, of course, that there was a British 

 Christianity which dated from a very early period — certainly from 

 the time of the Dioclesian persecution, from the age of St. Alban, 

 the proto-martyr of Britain, and the age of Constantino the 

 Great — but this Christianity was almost, if not quite, stamped out 

 in most parts of what we now call England, by the invasion and 

 conquests of the heathen Saxons, at an early date, and a large 

 portion of England, indeed nearly all of it, was for several 

 generations bound down in the heathenism of the Teutonic 

 Saxons and Angles. Cornwall, by retaining its independence, 

 retained its Christianity, until the period when the Saxons 

 themselves were converted by the labours, — partly of Saint 

 Augustine's successors, and partly by Brito-Celtic missionaries 

 from the Scotic monasteries of the North. 



In Cornwall, on the other hand, the missionaries of S. Patrick 

 from Ireland seem (and at a somewhat later period, i.e., the sixth 

 century, with the aid of their Welsh and Breton co-religionists, 

 of the Brito-Celtic Church) to have at an early date established 

 Christianity over a large portion of Cornwall, as was ably proved 

 by our ex-President, Mr. W. C. Borlase, M.P., in his presi- 

 dential address to our Society of 1878. 



