Albans, you see the local truth of the traditional details. Standing
on the narrow bridge across the little stream, you realise the blocking of
the bridge by the crowd of spectators nearly 1,600 years ago: and you can
see Alban, in his eagerness to win his martyr's crown, pushing his way
through the shallow water, rather than be delayed by the crowd on the
bridge. There is an interesting coincidence, in connection with the story
of St. Alban, which I have not seen noticed. The Gauls of Galatia, as we
have seen, were of kin to the Britons; and while the Britons were being
almost entirely saved from harm by Constantius, their Galatian cousins
were passing through a very fiery trial. The persecution of Diocletian
raged furiously in Galatia. As St. Alban is, I believe, the earliest
example of a name attached to a Christian site in this island, so the
earliest existing church in Ancyra, the capital of Gaulish Galatia, owes
its name to St. Clement, the martyr bishop of Ancyra, St. Alban's
contemporary in martyrdom.

It is unnecessary to say more on the evidence of Christianity in our
island at least from 200 onwards. But, as I have said before, there is an
entire dearth of information as to any special introduction of the new
faith. It came. It grew. How it came; who planted it; who watered it; all
is blank.

You are, of course, familiar with the story that Lucius, a British king,
requested Eleutherus, or Eleutherius, Bishop of Rome 171 to 185, to send
some one to teach his people Christianity, of which he had himself some
knowledge. The documents which profess to be the letters connected with
this request are unskilful forgeries. A note is appended to the name of
Eleutherus in the _Catalogue of Roman Pontiffs_ to the effect that "he
received a letter from Lucius, a British king, requesting that he might be
made a Christian." But this is a later addition, for it does not exist in
the earlier catalogue, which was itself written nearly 200 years after the
supposed event. It is an addition of the kind of which we have, alas! so
many examples at Rome and elsewhere, but especially and above all at Rome:
a statement inserted in later times for the sake of magnifying the claims
to ecclesiastical authority, and affording evidence, in an uncritical age,
of their recognition by former generations. The credit of this fallacious
insertion has rather unkindly, but perhaps not unjustly, been assigned to
Prosper of Aquitaine, of whom we sh