EARLY CELTIC CHURCHES OP BRITAIN AND IRELAND. 187 



names of the leaders, where we can casually discern them, are 

 Eoman names, the episcopal cities are Roman cities, the 

 questions that move the Church are not the principles of 

 discipline or life of a native community, they are the questions 

 that were being fought out in the East, in Italy, in Africa, or in 

 Roman Gaul. Welsli tradition knows nothing of these martyrs, 

 these bishops, and these Synods. They did not touch her life or 

 win her adherence. When Origen says, that among the Britons 

 " very many have not as yet heard the word of the Gospel," 

 he may well have been including almost the entire native 

 population. 



The Welsh genealogies of the native saints do not go back 

 further than about the beginning of the sixth century, and up 

 to that time no native Church on native lines and appealing to 

 the general mass of the population seems to have come into 

 existence. 



That there w^ere converts, perhaps numerous converts, among 

 the native population, I do not for a moment deny ; the British 

 quarter of the town lay beside or just beyond the Roman 

 quarter, as a rule ; the people intermingled in the army, in 

 commerce, by intermarriage, and in the daily intercourse of life. 

 Many of the people must have adopted the religion of their 

 conquerors. Pelagius himself was probably a Briton who hid 

 his native name of Morgan under the more lofty-sounding 

 Romanised form that it might sound better in the ears of his 

 superiors, as many a good Gaelic or Brythonic name has ]3een 

 turned into an Anglicised or Biblical form since his day to 

 avoid the satire of the Englishman. 



But these individual adhesions do not prove any sort of 

 national tendency. The Latin language, in which all ecclesiastical 

 worship was conducted and all religion taught, would in itself have 

 formed a boundary which the mass of the population would 

 have found it almost impossible to pass, except in cities where 

 the Gael and Brython mixed constantly with the Roman 

 settlers. 



The more I consider this question, the more convinced I feel 

 that the birth of the Celtic Church was not as yet ; that the 

 Church of these fourth-century Bishops and Councils can in no 

 real sense be looked upon as the British Church, but only as the 

 lioman Church in Britain, using here the word Roman in its 

 political and geographical sense as the Church of a people rather 

 than in its later and special sense as the Church of a creed. 



As the Roman cities of Aries, Lyons, and Treves sent their 

 bishops to the various Church Councils to represent, not the 



