HARVARD COLLEGE 4,1941 Dr. John R. Oliver COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY JAMES POTT AND COMPANY. THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS, RAHWAY, N. J. PREFACE. The following pages are an endeavour to present in as small a compass as possible the main outline of the history of the introduction of Christianity to Britain, and of the constitution and venerable antiquity of the Anglican Church, and its unbroken identity through all the vicissitudes and struggles of its existence during a period of sixteen centuries. The writer is largely indebted to the works of others, and claims no originality. He specially refers here to Mr. Guest's Origines Celtica, Mr. Gore's The Church and the Ministry, Dr. Giles' Excerpta in vol. ii. of The History of Ancient Britons, and to other works noticed in these pages. Several have been brought under contribution: but he has endeavoured in every case to allude to those he quotes or uses, and to examine and verify the references. And the happiest result of these pages would be to lead others to study these and similar works for themselves. QUEBEC, June 20, 1892. R. H. C. CONTENTS. iv. The efficient government and commercial en terprises of the Roman Empire brought the v. Many aver that Pudens and Claudia, if not the III. THE CONTINUITY OF THE FAITH IN BRITAIN, i. Forty years after the Ascension of our Lord the blessed Gospel was known in Britain, ii. Christianity thus planted in Britain continued on. Struggles of the Britons to preserve it, 51 iv. Christianity, therefore, could not have been IV. THE CONSTITUTION AND ORGANISATION OF THE i. The Constitution of the Anglican Church is at one with, and has continued the same as, that of the Church planted in Britain in ii. It is the essential continuity of the Constitution iii. It is what we find to be the Constitution and Organisation of the Church in Apostolic and sub-Apostolic times, as witnessed to by v. It is Episcopal. Witness of Western writers, V. THE Continuity of the ChuRCH IN THE BRITISH i. For fifteen hundred years the only Church known in the British Isles was what is now commonly known as the Anglican Church, ii. It asserted its right to exist as the National |