MISS ELEANOE H. HULL, ON THE EARLY CELTIC CHURCHES, ETC. 183 



we have here to say of Christianity in Britain occurred (with the 

 exception of part of the foreign missions) before that date. You 

 will, I think, agree with me that Augustine came to no heathen 

 country, but to one that had been not only long Christianised 

 itself, but wliich was making efforts to Christianise the neighbour- 

 ing peoples. The mission of Augustine was strictly to the 

 Saxons and Angles, who were pagan, but there lay behind the 

 settlements of these newcomers in the east and south a large 

 native population which was, at the period of Ms advent, almost 

 wholly Christian. 



There is nothing more difficult, nothing that requires more 

 virile intellectual energy and resolution, than to look straight 

 in the face any historical question wliich effects, or seems to effect, 

 our own personal position and views. There could be no better 

 example of this than the very curious and suggestive divergence 

 of opinion regarding the character and connections of the Celtic 

 Church. Presbyterian writers, looking chiefly to the fact that St. 

 Columba was not a bishop but a presbyter-abbot, have held 

 firmly to the belief that the Presbyterian form of Church 

 government was that which held good in the Churches of 

 Scotland and Ireland in the sixth and seventh centuries ; the 

 Protestant Church of Ireland, fixing its eyes chiefly upon the 

 undoubted reverence for and spread of the Scriptures (we should 

 be more correct to say of the Gospels, for no copy of the Bible has 

 come down to us from early Ireland, and only one copy of the 

 whole Xew Testament) in the Columban Monasteries, has held 

 itself to be the lineal descendant and true representative of 

 the ancient Church. Eoman Catholic writers, ignoring the 

 pecuhar organisation of the native communities, and minimising 

 the growth and development in Church doctrine and in the posi- 

 tion of the Bishops of Eome, have pointed triumphantly to the 

 Chm'ch of St. Patrick as a true Eoman Church in all the modern 

 sense of that term. All three alike, in order to defend their 

 special positions, have read backwards into the age of the fall of 

 the Eoman Empire ideas and antipathies that had no existence 

 at that early period, but belong to times much nearer to our 

 own. 



Still, the very existence of such an extraordinary diversity 

 of opinion is interesting, and it is calculated to send us back 

 to the original documents and to the general history of the 

 Western Church to try and find out what are the exact data on 

 which we have to build. We shall find, I think, that each 

 party has possessed itself of a certain share of truth, but has 

 held to it by the rigorous exclusion of otlier considerations 



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