And indeed dead as she is and silent, Canterbury is worthy of resurrection if only because she is as it were a part of him and a part, too, of our origins, the well, though not the source from which the Faith was given us.  For some thirteen hundred years when men have spoken of Canterbury, they have had in mind the metropolitan church of England, the great cathedral which still stands so finely there in the rather gloomy close behind Christ Church gate, rightly upon the foundations of its predecessors, Roman, Saxon, and Norman buildings.  Ever since there was a civilisation in England, there has been a church in this place; it is our duty, then, as well as our pleasure to approach it to-day with reverence.

Canterbury began as we began in the swamps and the forests, a little lake village in the marshes of the Stour, holding the lowest ford, not beyond the influence of the sea nor out of reach of fresh water.  When great Rome broke into England lost in mist, here certainly she established a city that was as it were the focus of all the ports of the Straits whence most easily a man might come into England from the continent.  Canterbury grew because she was almost equally near to the ports we know as Lympne, Dover, Richborough and Reculvers, so that a man setting out from the continent and doubtful in which port he would land, wholly at the mercy of wind and tide as he was, would name Canterbury to his correspondent in England as a place of meeting.  Thus Canterbury increased.  There in the Roman times doubtless a church arose which, doubtless, too, perished in the Diocletian persecution.  That it re-arose we know, for Venerable Bede describes it as still existing when, nearly two hundred years after the departure of the Roman legions, St Augustine came into England, sent by St Gregory to make us Christians.  He came, as we know, first into Kent to find Canterbury the royal capital of King Ethelbert, and when, says Bede, “an episcopal see had been given to Augustine in the king’s own city he regained possession (recuperavit) with the king’s help, of a church there which he was informed had been built in the city long before by Roman believers.  This he consecrated in the name of the Holy Saviour Jesus Christ, our Lord and God, and fixed there a home for himself and all his successors.” [Footnote:  Bede, Hist.  Eccl., I. xxviii.] This church, rudely repaired, added to and rebuilt, stood until Lanfranc’s day, when it was pulled down and destroyed to make way for the great Norman building out of which the church we have has grown.

The little church which Lanfranc destroyed and which had seen so many vicissitudes, was probably a work of the end of the fourth century, at any rate in its foundations.  Eadmer indeed who tells us all we know of it says that it was built on the plan of St Peter’s in Rome.  “This was that very church,” he writes, “which had been built by Romans as Bede witnesses in his history, and which