inding of the wheels of Time there
should cease to be a State Church in this land, the organization of
the churches holding to the Elizabethan form of worship will no doubt
continue to be centred and focussed at Canterbury.

[Illustration: CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL FROM THE NORTH WEST.
The state central or "Bell Harry" Tower is one of the most beautiful
works of the Perpendicular period in existence.]

As the first church mentioned in history associated with Christian
worship St. Martin's occupies a unique position, and yet the fabric of
the little building does not conclusively prove that it is even in
part the actual church of this fascinating period. Cautious
archaeologists, represented by Mr. J. T. Micklethwaite, regard the
earliest work in St. Martin's as belonging to the Saxon period, Roman
materials having merely been worked up by the later builders. On the
other hand, there are various careful antiquaries who are willing to
accept the oldest parts of the church as Roman, and claim that St.
Martin's is a Christian church put up during the Roman occupation.
Perhaps the problem will be solved by further discoveries, but until
then it seems wiser to regard St. Martin's as being in part a very
early Saxon building, very probably standing on the site of the
restored Roman church in which Queen Bertha worshipped before
Augustine's arrival. Even if it were possible to state that parts of
the walls were Roman, it would not be an easy matter to say whether
the building were older than the two early Christian churches of
North Cornwall, preserved through the ages by the drifting sand of
that exposed coastline; therefore, to write, as so many have done,
that St. Martin's is the oldest Christian church in England, is not
justified by the facts. Besides St. Martin's, William Thorne, a
fourteenth century chronicler, makes mention of "a temple or
idol-place where Ethelbert had been wont to pray and to sacrifice to
demons," and this building, instead of being destroyed, was purged
from its defilements and idols and hallowed by Augustine when he
dedicated it to St. Pancras the Roman boy-martyr. When the site, about
halfway between St. Martin's and St. Augustine's, was excavated in
1901, it was found to possess a nave about 47 feet long by 26 feet
wide, with an apsidal chancel nearly the same width and depth
separated from the nave by four Roman columns, and Mr. W.H. St. John
Hope, of the Society of Antiquaries, who carried out the o