The chapter of the cathedral consists of eight canons, who, considering that the spiritual life of the entire Department of the Hautes-Alpes--some hundred and fifty thousand souls--is in their care, must have a very busy time of it. St. Demetrius, the friend of St. John the Evangelist, has always been regarded as the first apostle and bishop of the diocese. He came from Rome to Gaul in the reign of Claudian, and began his work of evangelization in the environs of Vienne under St. Crescent, the disciple of St. Paul. From Vienne Demetrius came immediately to Gap and established the diocese here. Numerous conversions were made and the Church quickly gained adherents, but persecution was yet rife, as likewise was superstition, and the priests were denounced to the governors of the province, who forthwith put them to death in true barbaric fashion. Amid these inflictions, however, and the later Protestant persecutions in Dauphiné, the diocese grew to great importance, and endures to-day as a suffragan of Aix, Arles, and Embrun. The Église de Gap has even yet the good fortune to possess personal _reliques_ of her first bishop, and accordingly displays them with due pride and ceremony on his _jour de fête_, the 26th October of each year. Says a willing but unknowing French writer: "Had Demetrius--who came to Gap in the first century--any immediate successors? That we cannot say. It is a period of three hundred years which separates his tenure from that of St. Constantine, the next prelate of whom the records tell." Three other dioceses of the former ecclesiastical province have been suppressed, and Gap alone has lived to exert its tiny sphere of influence upon the religious life of the present day. The history of Gap has been largely identified with the Protestant cause in Dauphiné. There is, in the Prefecture, a monument to the Due de Lesdiguières--Françoise de Bonne--who, from the leadership of the Protestants went over to the Roman faith, in consideration of his being given the rank of _Connétable de France_. Why the mere fact of his apostasy should have been a sufficient and good reason for this aggrandizement, it is difficult to realize in this late day; though we know of a former telegraph messenger who became a count. Another reformer, Guillaume Farel, was born and lived at Gap. "He preached his first sermon," says History, "at the mill of Burée, and his followers soon drove the Catholics from the place; when he himself took possession of the pulpits of the town." From all this dissension from the Roman faith--though it came comparatively late in point of time--rose the apparent apathy for church-building which resulted in the rather inferior cathedral at Gap.