The Christian Church in These Islands before the Coming of Augustine: Three Lectures Delivered at St. Paul's in January 1894Browne, G. F. (George Forrest)
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The Christian Church in These Islands before the Coming of Augustine: Three Lectures Delivered at St. Paul's in January 1894
Browne, G. F. (George Forrest)
Great Britain -- Church history -- To 449
There is one very interesting fact, which deserves to be noted in
connection with this mysterious Gallican bishop. The Italian Mission paid
very special honour to his memory and his remains. There is in the first
volume of Dugdale's _Monasticon_[5] a copy of an ancient drawing of St.
Augustine's, Canterbury. This is not, of course, the Cathedral Church,
which was an old church of the British times restored by Augustine and
dedicated to the Saviour; "Christ Church" it still remains. St.
Augustine's was the church and monastery begun in Augustine's lifetime,
and dedicated soon after his death to St. Peter and St. Paul, as Bede (i.
33) and various documents tell us precisely. This fact, that the church
was dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, was represented last June, when
"the renewal of the dedication of England to St. Mary and St. Peter" took
place[6], by the statement that "the first great abbey church of
Canterbury was dedicated to St. Peter." In the preparatory pastoral,
signed by Cardinal Vaughan and fourteen other Roman Catholic Bishops,
dated May 20, 1893, the statement took this form[7]:--"The second
monastery of Canterbury was dedicated to St. Peter himself." Not only is
that not so, but I cannot find evidence that Augustine dedicated any
church anywhere "to St. Peter himself." Of the two Apostles, St. Peter and
St. Paul, who were united in the earliest of all Saints' days, and still
are so united in the Calendar of the Roman Church, though we have given to
them two separate days, of the two, if we must choose one of them, St.
Paul, not St. Peter, was made by Augustine the Apostle of England. To St.
Paul was dedicated the first church in England dedicated to either of the
two "himself," that is, alone; and that, too, this church, the first and
cathedral church of the greater of the two places assigned by Gregory as
the two Metropolitical sees of England, London and York.
The "dedication of England to St. Mary" has a similar difficulty to face.
There is no evidence that Augustine assigned any dedication to the Blessed
Virgin. The first church mentioned with that dedication was built by
Laurentius and dedicated by Mellitus. But if twenty churches had been
dedicated by Augustine to the Virgin and to St. Peter, England would have
been the richer by twenty churches, and that would have been all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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