The line taken by a recent writer, Professor W. M. Ramsay, in his most interesting and able book, "The Church in the Roman Empire," traverses this argument about the Galatian Epistle. In opposition to the great divine who for eight years spoke from this pulpit, and made this Epistle a special study for a great part of his life, Professor Ramsay maintains, by arguments drawn from geographical and epigraphical facts not known thirty years ago, when Dr. Lightfoot first wrote, that the Epistle was addressed to the people in the southern part of the Roman province called Galatia, who were not Galatians at all; and was not addressed to those in the northern part, who were Galatians proper, and occupied the whole of the country named from them Galatia. But I use the illustration, notwithstanding this. The controversy is not quite ended yet; and I do not feel sure that the difficulties of the Epistle itself, from Professor Ramsay's point of view, are very much less considerable than those which Dr. Lightfoot's view undoubtedly has to face. In any case the Galatians proper were of close kin with the more civilised of our British predecessors--ancestors we may perhaps say--and this at least gives us a personal interest in what at first sight would seem to be a very far-off controversy. The tradition which used to find most favour was that Joseph of Arimathea came over with twelve companions, and received from a British king in the south-west a portion of land for each of his companions, and founded the ecclesiastical establishment of Glastonbury. There is certainly some very ancient history connected with the "twelve hides" of Glastonbury. Go as far back as we will in the records, we never come to the beginning of the "xii. hidæ." The Domesday Survey tells us, eight hundred years ago, that the twelve hides "never have been taxed." Clearly they take us back to some very early donation; and I see no reason--beyond the obvious difficulty of its geographical remoteness--against the tradition that here was the earliest Christian establishment in Britain. At the Council of Basle, in 1431, when the Western Church was holding councils with a view to reforming from within the enormous abuses of the Roman Court, a prelude to the "Reformation" into which we were driven a hundred years later, the precedence of churches was determined by the date of their foundation. The English Church claimed and received precedence as founded in Apostolic times by Joseph of Arimathea. Those were not very critical days, so far as historical evidence was concerned, and I should not have mentioned this legend, or should only have mentioned it and passed on, but for a recent illustration of a part of the story. The more we look into early local legends, the more disinclined we become to say that there is nothing substantial in them. The story has from early times gone, that the first British Christians erected at Glastonbury a church made of twigs, of wattle-work.