have guided the pen of the writer of these pages! "If there is any subject which should make the historian's hand tremble, while he guides the pen of truth, it is the Church of Christ, which He has purchased with His blood; which is, by His dispensation, militant here on earth, dispersed through this naughty world, and every page of its history rendered obscure by the crafts and assaults of the devil, the weakness and wickedness of the flesh, the friendship and the enmity of the world, the sins of bad men, the infirmities of good ones; and by the divine ordinance, that it shall ever be a body consisting of many members, often incapable, not merely of executing, but of appreciating the office of each other." Prowess and arts did tame And tune men's hearts, before the Gospel came; HERBERT. HE apostle St. Paul, after his first imprisonment at Rome, is reported by the early Church-historians to have fulfilled his intention of preaching the gospel in Spain, and to have gone to the utmost bounds of the West, and the islands that lie in the ocean. It has therefore been supposed that he was either himself in Britain, or that he sent some of the companions of his travels to make known on these shores the name of Christ. It is certain that a Christian Church was planted here in the time of the apostles, and, as it would appear, at the date of St. Paul's travels to the West, A.D. 63. B |