races had--dare I say have?--of themselves; these are
questions to which I cannot venture to give an answer. There the fact
remains, that Pelagianism did appeal very strongly to the temperament of
those who then dwelt in our land. And coupled with this is the fact, that,
however orthodox the clergy and bishops might be, and however well versed
in the great controversy in which in the previous century they had played
their part, the subtleties of this new controversy, initiated as it was by
one of their own or kindred race, springing up from their own nature and
appealing to the nature of their people, were too much for them--as indeed
they had been for Pope Zosimus. Agricola was the name of the man who acted
as the apostle of the Pelagians in the home regions, the son, we are told,
of a bishop of Pelagian views.

What our predecessors may have lacked in subtlety, they more than made up
in practical common sense. If they could not grapple with the heresy
themselves, they sent for those who could. They applied to their nearest
ecclesiastical neighbour, the Church of Gaul, to which no doubt they
looked partly as their mother and partly as their elder sister. The
account of their application and the response it met with comes to us from
a life of Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, the person chiefly concerned,
written by special request forty years after his death by an eminent
person, and published on the request of the then Bishop of Auxerre. When
the application reached the heads of the Gallican Church, a numerous synod
was called together, and Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, and Lupus, Bishop of
Troyes, were appointed to visit Britain. The manner of treating the heresy
had been forced upon the attention of the Gallican prelates by their own
experiences. At that very time semi-Pelagianism was rife in the south of
Gaul, about Marseilles, and it continued in force there for a long time,
another fellow-countryman of ours, Faustus the Briton, imbuing even the
famous monastery of Lerins with this modified form of the heresy. To
concert measures for dealing with the south of Gaul, Prosper of Aquitaine,
a monk and probably a layman, afterwards secretary to Pope Leo the Great,
went to Rome about two years after this to consult the Pope, and from
Celestine he no doubt heard what he repeated or embellished twenty-five
years later. He tells us that the Pope took pains to keep the "Roman
island" Catholic, referring of course to the long occup