taken in, 250 years later, by the superior subtlety of our countryman, the Briton Pelagius. Eleutherus, or Victor, was only saved from this grave mistake by the advice of an Oriental heretic. But apart from all such considerations, which I mention historically and not polemically, I see no reason why Britons should go so far afield if they wished to learn of Christ. With Gaul so close at hand, its people so near of kin, its government so identical with theirs, the Britons would hear of Christianity, would learn Christianity, from and through Gaul, and would look to Gaul, not Italy. But if we look to the state of Gaul in the time to which this British king is assigned, we shall see that it was in the very highest degree improbable that he should aim at making his people Christians. It was a time of terrible trial, with everything to be lost by becoming Christian. What sort of Christian hero was this, in the year 175 or 180, who desired to lead his nation to a change in their religion, that they might court the barbarous tortures inflicted by their kinsfolk on all of the Christian name at this exact conjuncture? The new faith was planted in the south of Gaul comparatively early, but it spread northwards very slowly. The first congregations, those of Lyons and Vienne, were formed by Christians from Asia Minor, where some of them had known Polycarp, who was a pupil of St. John. Soon after the foundation of this infant Church, the great persecution of its members took place, about the year 175, when Eleutherus was bishop of Rome. The details of the persecution are so well known, through the letter which the survivors wrote--not to Rome, but to their parent Church and personal friends in Asia and Phrygia,--a letter preserved to us by the Greek historian Eusebius, that I think they have given a wrong impression as to the extent of the Christian Church in Gaul towards the end of the second century[26]. The Christians at Lyons and Vienne were a small and isolated flock, not however isolated as foreigners speaking a strange tongue, for Irenaeus, who was one of them, mentions his daily use of the Gallic language. They seem to have been almost the only Christians known in Gaul. The ignorance of the practices of Christianity was so great among the Gauls, that they were accused of crimes such as they did not believe any man committed,--banquets of Thyestes, incests of Oedipus. That was in the year 175. Lyons was a wonderful water-centre. An examination of a good map will surprise even those who know France fairly well. North, south, east, and west, there were water-ways. Even Eusebius, writing far away in the East, remarked on this; and you know how tantalisingly silent early historians are as a rule about such things. And yet Christianity spread exceedingly slowly. Gregory of Tours, whose inclination would not be to make little of the early Church in Gaul, seeing that he was a Gallo-Roman of lofty