The Christian Church in These Islands before the Coming of Augustine

13

Known as the Brythonic branch of the race.

14

As has been already remarked, they are now generally described as the Brythonic and Goidelic branches of the Celtic race.

15

Or with ab, as Bevan and Baddam, that is, ab Evan and ab Adam. Map and mab, ap and ab, stand for “son.”

16

St. Peter is now being claimed as one of the Apostles of Britain; but it is impossible to deal seriously with such a proposition. A pamphlet with this view was issued in 1893, by the Reverend W. Fleming, M. R. Cardinal Baronius, holding the view that St. Peter lived long in Rome, felt the difficulty which any one with the historic sense must feel, that St. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans makes no mention of St. Peter as being then in Rome, nor does the history in the last chapters of the Acts. The explanation given is that St. Peter, though permanently resident in Rome, was away from home on these occasions. As there is no trace of him in any known country at the time, Britain is taken as the place of his sojourn during some of the later years of St. Paul, probably as the country where traces of his sojourn were least likely to be found on record. Mr. Fleming quotes a passage from a book written in 1609 by the second “Vicar Apostolic of England and Scotland,” which is only too typical an example of a style of assertion and argument of which we might have hoped that we had seen the last. “I assure the indifferent reader, that St. Peter’s preaching to the ancient Britons, on the one side is affirmed both by Latins and Greeks, by ancient and modern, by foreign and domestic, by Catholic writers… by Protestant antiquaries…; and on the other side, denied by no one ancient writer, Greek or Latin, foreign or domestic, Catholic or other.”