EARLY CELTIC CHUECHES OF BKITAIN AXD IRELAND. J 91 



with to feed His poor, unless thou, to aid Him, plunderest another 

 man's goods 1 " — (Chap, xii), Migne, Fat. Lat. t. 50. 



Of Pelagius and liis heresy we need not say much liere. 

 " The production of a heretic," says Professor George Stokes 

 cynically, " gave the most vigorous and satisfactory of proofs of 

 tiie interest of the British Church (read ' Church in Britain ') in 

 theological questions." {Ireland and the Celtic Cliurch, p. 12.) 



The wide spread and the attractiveness of this teaching of 

 Pelagius is proved by the two visits of St. Germanus and his 

 companions from Gaul to try and eradicate it. Had Pelagius 

 remained in Britain and written his books in retii^ement there, 

 perhaps we should have heard little of him or his writings. 

 But Pelagius did not address himself to the Britons ; he was a 

 great traveller : we find him in Eome, in Sicily, and in Palestine. 

 It was from Piome, where he lived quietly for many years, that 

 he wrote his works, On the Trinity, On Testimonies, and On 

 St. Pauls Episthii. Had he not prudently retired from Piome 

 during the descent of Alaric and the Goths in 409—410 he would 

 with his own eyes have witnessed the sack of Eome. Pelagius 

 was a student by nature and habit, a thinker who in the quiet 

 of the study worked out theories on the abstruse questions of 

 original sin, of free-will, and of baptism ; his teaching was, in 

 the beginning at least, but the over-emphatic reassertion of a 

 forgotten truth, the grave truth of the freedom and responsibility 

 of the human will. Later, when cMven into fresh and more 

 explicit statements, his theories took a more controversial form, 

 and he impugned doctrines held to be fundamental in the 

 Church. Two circumstances forced the teaching of Pelagius 

 into a prominence which it would probably have otherwise 

 escaped. The first was his friendship with Crelestius, an 

 Irishman living in Eome (I would ask you to note the fact 

 of a notable Christian Irishman living in Eome fifty years 

 before the mission of St. Patrick}, who with all the ardour 

 of the Celtic temperament, embraced the doctrines of Pelagius 

 and spent his life in their dissemination throughout the 

 Christian world ; the second was the fact that in Africa at that 

 very moment the sombre and subtle mind of Augustine of Hippo 

 was formulating these doctrines of predestination and election, to 

 which the teaching of Pelagius was fundamentally opposed. 

 Augustine pursued Pelagius with unrelenting animosity. He 

 sent a friend of his own, Orosius, to watch Pelagius and report 

 his doings to him. When two Synods in Palestine fully 

 acquitted Pelagius, he secured his condemnation in two African 

 Councils at Carthage ; when Pope Zosimus was won over by 



