Apart from their heretical tendency, the works or work of Fastidius may be taken as containing excellent teaching. He naturally presses most the practical side, the necessity of a good life. "Our Lord said," he shrewdly reminds the reader, "If thou wilt enter into life, keep the commandments; He did not say keep faith only. For if faith is all that is required, it is too much to say that the commandments must be kept. Far be it from me to suppose, that my Lord said too much on any point." One interesting allusion to the state of the country in his time, the Christian settlements here and there in the midst of a heathen population, it may be the Romano-Briton among the unmixed Britons, occurs in a passage full of practical teaching:--"It is the will of God that His people should be holy, and free from all stain of unrighteousness; so righteous, so merciful, so pure, so unspotted from the world, so single-hearted, that the heathen should find in them no fault, but should say in wonder, Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, and the people whom He hath chosen for His own inheritance." LECTURE III. Early Christianity in other parts of these islands.--Ninian in the south-west of Scotland.--Palladius and Patrick in Ireland.--Columba in Scotland--Kentigern in Cumbria.--Wales.--Cornwall.--The fate of the several Churches.--Special rites &c. of the British Church.--General conclusion. We are to consider this evening the early existence of Christianity in other parts of these islands, in order that we may have some idea of the actual extent to which Christianity prevailed in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, at the time when Augustine came to Kent. The Italians appear to have blamed the British Church for its want of missionary zeal. But that only applied to missions to the Angles and Saxons; and I have never quite been able to see how the Britons could be expected to go to their sanguinary and conquering foes with any message, least of all to tell them that their religion was hopelessly false. The expulsion of the Britons from the land of their fathers was too recent for that; the retort of the Saxons too apposite, that at least their gods had shewn themselves stronger than the God of the Britons.