Unless we are prepared to believe that our island was Christianised by some influence apart from Gaul, and reaching us through some route other than that of Gaul--and I do not see any evidence for anything of the kind--we must, I think, take it that our position was that of younger sister to the Church in Gaul. All the indications point in that direction. It is most cruel that the British history has all been blotted out, by the severity of the English conquest and the barbarity of the bordering tribes. In Gaul, the history was not blotted out by the successful invasion of the Franks. Gregory of Tours died in the year 594, of which we have said so much. He was a Gallo-Roman, one of the race overrun by the Franks; and yet he writes the history of the Franks, putting on record an immense amount of information about the earlier Gaulish times--not very trustworthy, it is true. But for the sack of London by the East Saxons, of which I shall have to speak later, we might have had a history that would solve all our doubts, from a Brito-Roman Bishop of London, exactly contemporary with Gregory of Tours. Failing all such record, we must read the signs for ourselves, and they point in the direction I have described. They make us a younger sister, not very much younger, of the Church of Gaul--a Church founded from Ephesus--Oriental in its origin, not Western. I may, perhaps, have time to indicate in my concluding lecture some points which shew the non-Western connection of the British Church. The probability is that from Tertullian's time onwards the faith spread and grew here quietly. The Christian Church certainly took to itself an outward form. Bishops were appointed in central places. By the year 314--that is, in one century of growth--it appears that we had in Britain a Christian Church as fully equipped as any corresponding area of the Continent at that time was. What is the evidence for this? At the Council of Arles, A. D. 314, three British bishops were present. Two of them are described as of the province of Britain; the third is not so described. All are included among the bishops of the Galliae, that is, of the province of the Roman Empire so called. Three may not sound a large number, but as a question of proportion it is in fact large[28]. Thirty-two or thirty-three bishops, in all, signed the decrees of the Council. Of these, seven were from Italy and the islands, ten from Africa, eleven from what we call France, three from Britain, and two from elsewhere. The large number of bishops from Africa will surprise no one who knows the prominence of the African Church in the early times, the large number of its bishoprics, the area which it covered. It was the birthplace and home of Latin Christianity, while the Roman Church was still practically a Greek Church. In Africa, not in Italy, the Latin version of the Scriptures was first made.