188 



MISS ELKANOft H. B.ULL, ON THE 



native inhabitants of Gaul or Germany but the Eoman adherents 

 of Christianity in these cities, so Eoman Britain took a dignified 

 share in the general life of the Church. 



But by all this the people were untouched ; it lay apart from 

 their whole system of ideas, their life and thought : the Churcli 

 organization, wdth its recognised sees, its external ties, its foreign 

 language, and its system of thought and litual based, as we can 

 hardly doubt, upon the Eoman model, had no appeal for the 

 native Celtic population, and we cannot imagine that the 

 extension of its borders passed much beyond the towns. If 

 there was ever to be a native Church in Britain it must be a 

 Church based upon some other system of development and more 

 in accordance with the habits and tendencies of native life. 



That such a Church, in fact, arose from the very bosom of 

 the people themselves I hope to show you, but the distinction 

 between the system of the one and the system of the other was 

 clearly marked. 



Of the personalities who actually moved and moulded and 

 impressed their spirit upon this early Brito-Eoman Church we do 

 not know so much as we should wish ; yet four names isolate 

 themselves from the mass of obscurer personalities, and of three 

 out of the four we are able to judge of their character and ideas 

 from their own writings, while of the fourth all w^e know is from 

 a single phrase in Bede. The names are St. Ninian or Ninias, 

 Fastidius, Pelagius, and Patrick. Let me say a couple of words 

 about these four men. Of the first, the Venerable Bede tells us 

 in introducing St. Columba to his readers, that 



"the Southern Picts, who dwell on the southern side of the 

 mountains {i.e., the Grampians) had long before St. Columba's 

 time, as was reported, forsaken the errors of idolatry and embraced 

 the truth by the preaching of Ninias, a most reverend bishop and 

 holy man of the British nation, who had been regularly instructed 

 in Eome in the faith and mysteries of the truth, and whose 

 episcopal see, named after St. Martin the bishop and famous for a 

 stately church, is still in existence." — {Eccle. Hist., Book III, ch. 4.) 



This is a1)solutely all that we know from English sources 

 about St. Ninian ; there are many later lives of him, but they are 

 merely ingenious expansions after the approved fashion in vogue 

 with tli(i niediicval hagioh)gist of these words of liede. lUit the 

 Irish hold fast to the tradition that Ninian was half an 

 Irishman ; that he was born of an Ii ish mother and that part of 

 his education was gained in Ireland. There he is called in the 

 loving C(!ltic fashion Mo-iienn or my Ninian," as the name of 



