E. 12.—­Turning next to St. Paul’s Second Epistle to Timothy, we find, in close connection, the names of Pudens and Claudia (along with that of the future Pope Linus) amongst the salutations from Roman Christians.  And recent excavations have established the fact that the house of Pudens was used for Christian worship at this date, and is now represented by the church known as St. Pudentiana.[405] That this should have been so proves that this Pudens was no slave going under his master’s name (as was sometimes done), but a man of good position in Rome.  Short of actual proof it would be hard to imagine a series of evidences more morally convincing that the Pudens and Claudia of Martial are the Pudens and Claudia of St. Paul, and that they, as well as Pomponia, were Christians.  Whether, then, St. Paul did or did not actually visit Britain, the earliest British Christianity is, at least, closely connected with his name.

E. 13.—­Neither legendary nor historical sources tell us of any further development of British Christianity till the latter days of the 2nd century.  Then, however, it had become sufficiently widespread to furnish a common-place for ecclesiastical declamation on the all-conquering influence of the Gospel.  Both Tertullian and Origen[406] thus use it.  The former numbers in his catalogue of believing countries even the districts of Britain beyond the Roman pale, Britannorum inaccessa Romanis loca, Christo vero subdita[407].  And in this lies the interest of his reference, as pointing to the native rather than the Roman element being the predominant factor in the British Church.  For just at this period comes in the legend preserved by Bede,[408] that a mission was sent to Britain by Pope Eleutherius[409] in response to an appeal from “Lucius Britanniae Rex.”  The story, which Bede probably got from the ’Catalogus Pontificum,’[410] may be apocryphal; but it would never have been invented had British Christianity been found merely or mainly in the Roman veneer of the population.  Modern criticism finds in it this kernel of truth, that the persecution which gave the Gallican Church the martyrs of Lyons, also sent her scattered refugees as missionaries into the less dangerous regions of Britain;—­those remoter parts, in especial, where even the long arm of the Imperial Government could not reach them.

E. 14.—­The Picts, however, as a nation, remained savage heathens even to the 7th century, and the bulk of our Christian population must have been within the Roman pale; but little vexed, it would seem, by persecution, till it came into conflict with the thorough-going Imperialism of Diocletian.[411] Its martyrs were then numbered, according to Gildas, by thousands, according to Bede by hundreds; and their chief, St. Alban, at least, is a fairly established historical entity.[412] Nor is there any reason to doubt that after Constantine South Britain was as fully Christian as any country in Europe.  In the earliest days of his reign (A.D. 314) we find three bishops,[413] together with a priest and a deacon, representing[414] the British Church at the Council of Arles (which, amongst other things, condemned the marriage of the “innocent divorcee"[415]).  And the same number figure in the Council of Ariminum (360), as the only prelates (out of the 400) who deigned to accept from the Emperor the expenses of their journey and attendance.