The words of the poet Spenser do not inaptly describe this scene of other days:—­

A little, lowly hermitage it was,
Downe in a dale—­
Far from resort of people, that did pas
In treveill to and fro:  a litle wyde
There was a holy chappell edifyde,
Wherein the hermite dewly wont to say
His holy things each morn and eventyde;
Thereby a crystall streame did gently play,
Which, from a sacred fountaine welled forth away.

Here then, more than fourteen centuries ago, people called upon God; and when their little sanctuary was overwhelmed with the sand, they removed to the other side of the river, and built themselves another church; but they still continued to bury their dead around and above the oratory and resting-place of St. Piran.

When my book was published, there ensued a hot controversy about the subject of it; and some who came to see the “Lost Church” for themselves, declared that it was nothing more than “a modern cowshed;” others would not believe in the antiquity I claimed for it:  one of these even ventured to assert his opinion in print, that “it was at least eight centuries later than the date I had fixed;” another asked in a newspaper letter, “How is it, if this is a church, that there are no others of the same period on record?”

This roused me to make further research; and I was soon rewarded by finding in the registry at Exeter a list of ninety-two churches existing in Cornwall alone in the time of Edward the Confessor, of which Lam-piran was one.  With the help of another antiquary, I discovered nine in one week, in the west part of the county, with foundation walls and altar tombs, of which I published an account in the “Archaeological Journal.”  This paper set other persons to work, who discovered similar remains in various parts of the country; and thus it was proved to demonstration that we had more ecclesiastical antiquities, and of earlier date, than we were aware of.

Next, my attention was directed to Cornish crosses; about which I also sent a paper, with illustrations, as a good secretary and correspondent to the same Journal.  My researches on this subject took me back to a very remote time.  I found crosses among Roman remains, with inscriptions, something like those in the Catacombs near Rome—­these were evidently Christian; but I found crosses also among Druidic antiquities.  I could not help inquiring, “Where did the Druids get this sign?” From the Phoenicians.  “Where did they get it?” From the Egyptians.  “Where did they get it?” Then I discovered that the cross had come to Egypt with traditions about a garden, a woman, a child, and a serpent, and that the cross was always represented in the hand of the second person of their trinity of gods.  This personage had a human mother, and slew the serpent which had persecuted her.*

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* These traditions came to the Egyptians from an ancestor who had come over the flood with seven others. _______________________