[5] There was, of course, an ancient British Church long before the sixth century, and there is evidence that it existed in the middle of the second century. It sent bishops to the Council of Arles in 314, and there is a church at Canterbury in which Queen Bertha's chaplain celebrated some twenty-five years before the coming of Augustine. But its origin is shrouded in mystery, and it had been practically extinguished by Jutes, Saxons, and Angles before Augustine arrived. "Of the ancient British Church," writes Bishop Stubbs, in an unpublished letter, "we must be content to admit that history tells us next to nothing, and that what glimmerings of truth we think we can discover in legend grow fainter and fainter the more closely they are examined. Authentic records there are none." Some ascribe the first preaching of the Gospel in Britain to St. Peter, others to St. Paul, or St. James, or St. Simon Zelotes, and the monks of Glastonbury ascribe it to their founder, Joseph of Arimathea, who was, they say, sent to Britain by St. Philip with eleven others in A.D. 63. Cf. letter of Dr. Bright to "The Guardian," 14 March, 1888, and see "Letters and Memoirs of William Bright," pp. 267 _seq_. [6] i.e. the English, as distinct from the British Church. [7] "The word Establishment," writes Bishop Stubbs, "means, of course, the national recognition of our Church as a Christian Church, as the representment of the religious life of the nation as historically worked out and by means of property and discipline enabled to discharge, so far as outward discharge can insure it, the effectual performance of the duties that membership of a Christian Church involves. It means the national recognition of a system by which every inch of land in England, and every living soul in the population is assigned to a ministration of help, teaching, advice, and comfort of religion, a system in which every English man woman and child has a right to the service of a clergyman and to a home of spiritual life in the service of the Church" ("Visitation Charges," p. 303). [8] A State can, of course, _endow_, as well as establish, any form of religion it selects. It has a perfect right to do so. But the State has never endowed the Church of England, and it can only disendow it in the sense that it can rob it of its own endowments--just as it can, by Act of Parliament, rob any business man of his money. It has done this once already. At the Great Rebellion, the Church of England was, in this sense, disestablished and disendowed. By the Act of Uniformity of Charles II, it was reinstated into the rights and liberties from which it had been deposed. But it remained the same Church which Augustine established in England all the time. Its reinstatement no more made the Church a new Church, than the restoration of Charles II made the monarchy a new monarchy.