Latin Christianity was the precursor of Latin organisation. Where the rules of the Celtic Church prevailed, the opinion existed that they were not subject to any external interference the old tribal organisations, the old family theories, traditions, and prejudices were untouched, and Celtic organisation moulded Celtic Christianity into accord with its habits and customs. In nothing perhaps is the distinction more clearly shewn than in the ideas of the two Churches as to Saints. It must not, however, be assumed that the Celtic system could not and did not produce men who were fitted to rank on an equality with any Saint of the Latin Church in personal holiness or in any Saintly virtues. Many might be mentioned-one will suffice. Cadoc would have been a glory to any Church, an honour to any system. He combined all the characteristics of the Celtic Saintroyal descent, questionable birth, exercise of supernatural power—with all the qualifications of the Latins. His piety was unbounded, his charity never failed. More of his teaching has come down to us than of any other Welsh Saint, and his principles are so democratic that it is difficult to believe any monastic scribe would have ever invented them. For instance, speaking to a Welsh prince, Cadoc said: "Remember thou art but a man, there is no king like him. who is king of himself." Cadoc the Wise, as he is termed, had one of the greatest reputations of any of the Celtic Saints, not only in Wales, but beyond her borders. In Brittany he remained the patron Saint of Breton chivalry as long as that chivalry lasted. It is said that at the alleged Battle of the Thirty-that most knightly feat of Breton knights-on their way to the combat those knights appealed to Cadoc for aid, and placed themselves under his protection. When they returned victorious from the strife their first act was to offer thanks to Cadoc, the patron of Breton warriors. Some centuries later, as a British general was leading British troops to complete the conquest of Canada from France, quoting, in the form in which an English poet has preserved in one of the best known poems in our language, the saying of Cadoc, "The paths of glory lead but to the grave", he exclaimed, “I would rather have been the author of that idea than take Quebec". Cadoc is but one of those men whom we know only in a sea of Celtic legend and anachronism, yet who stand forth as the representatives of a faith, the leaders of a people, the glories of a Church, who prove that even in the strictest Latin sense the early Welsh Saints were real Saints. Although they lacked the Papal sanction they have a better claim to the distinction, for they were Saints by an earlier title, the universal assent of their countrymen; they were holy by a ceremony mightier than canonisation—the common consent of Christian people. SOME ASPECTS OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH IN WALES DURING THE FIFTH AND SIXTH CENTURIES.1 BY REV. HUGH WILLIAMS, M.A., PROFESSOR OF CHURCH HISTORY AT THE THEOLOGICAL COLLEGE, BALA. 66 Prima lex historiæ, ne quid falsi dicere audeat, deinde ne A STRANGE charm seems to have been hidden in the difficult questions which range themselves around the first introduction of Christianity into Britain. That dim past has drawn mind after mind to itself in the bold endeavour to compel it to tell something of its story. Regretfully as we put aside this legend and that, which pious minds have woven, to show how an apostle or some "apostolic man" visited these shores, we feel that no one can in truth say who the first Christians of Britain were. The churches are here when we first find any distinct mention of " the faith of Christ", and we need not now repeat the various conjectures advanced by historians respecting the way in which the Christian religion found, for the first time, a home in our land. If I put aside all these questions, though feeling to the full the fascination that lurks in them, I do so, partly, because of the larger material we possess for a later period, though it is extremely scanty when compared with that 1 Read before the Society of Cymmrodorion on the 15th of June 1894, at 20, Hanover Square. Chairman, Mr. W. Prydderch Williams. available in the case of other countries, but chiefly because I believe I am drawn to a period which is in reality a beginning. I mean the beginning of a Christian Welsh people. Schultze, in the Preface to his History of the Downfall of Græco-Roman Heathenism, has a sentence which I should wish to keep in mind in all that I may say in this paper. "In truth", he says, "Church history is a History of the World and of Peoples; and the theological element therein is only an attribute of it, not its essence." There are places where theology propounds weighty questions arising from the history of the Church, and where it is meet that men should make an honest attempt to answer them. In this place, however, I feel that I should be committing a serious error were I to regard the history of the Church in any other light than as a part of the history of the Welsh people. I will not deny that the other questions are to me very real and living; but I have also felt for years that a dispassionate study of all that original ecclesiastical records present to us, by the same methods as we study other histories, should precede whatever conclusions we draw in answer to the theological questions that belong to the history of the Church. Difficult as it is for us to sever ourselves from prepossessions, I am myself profoundly impressed with the large amount of solid contributions lately made for workers in this subject, by men who claim very different kinships in the Christian world. We are all becoming better students, and a brisk interchange of mental produce is creating what might be called "a good state" of the intellectual market in the province of Church history. I could wish to treat the subject of my paper as a humble follower of the painstaking students of history in Germany, France, and our own two islands. More particularly, I have tried to seek constantly the light that may be afforded by the history, both of the Church on the continent, and of the Church in Ireland. I found this especially advantageous in the attempt to bridge chasms (too often the case!) by conjecture. For there can be no doubt that the difficulty is enhanced by the necessity for thus venturing. But I feel more and more convinced that a wide and familiar acquaintance with the history of the Church in Gaul or in the Frankish kingdom, and of its relation to the Roman Church, as well as with the history of the stirring events of the sixth and seventh centuries in the Irish Church, may supply us with valuable hints, and lead to a right understanding of the course of Christianity among the Welsh people. It may not be amiss to state that the special object of this paper is not to set forth accumulated facts or to describe events, but to arrive at conclusions based on such facts as to some general aspects of Welsh Christianity in the earliest. centuries of its existence. I have said that we are investigating a period that is a beginning. Christian churches there were in Britain, undoubtedly, from very early times; yet I have been driven to the conclusion that there was no really British Church, that is, a Church of the native Celtic inhabitants, before the fifth century. The Church, three of whose bishops attended the Council of Arles, was the Church of the resident Roman population, not of the people of Britain. When Hilary Pictavensis, in A.D. 358, writes from exile to his "brethren. and co-bishops of Germania Prima and to the bishops of the Provinces of Britain", congratulating himself and them upon their firm orthodoxy in the Arian controversy, he writes to men that were Romans living among a native non-christian population. Those British bishops (κaтà ВρETтavíav) mentioned by Athanasius as adherents to the faith of Nicea; the three bishops, too poor to travel at their own expense |