ns; for I think that in
that informal way we pick up a good deal of interesting information, and
get perhaps to feel more at home in a period than by pursuing a more
formal and stilted course. Indeed a good deal of what I have said already
has evidently been said with that object.

The first question I propose for our consideration is this:--Who were the
people who built the churches? It is not a very explanatory answer, to
say "The Britons." There is a good deal left to the imagination in that
answer, with most of us. With the help of the best qualified students, but
without any hope that we could harmonise all the diverse views if we went
far into detail, let us look into the matter a little. It may be well for
all of us to remember in this enquiry that our foundations are not very
solid; we are on thin ice. Nor is the way very smooth; it is easy to trip.

We need not go back to the time of the cavemen, interesting and indeed
artistic as the evidence of their remains shews them to have been. Their
reign was over before Britain became an island, before a channel separated
it from the continent. It is enough for our present purpose to realise,
that when the great geological changes had taken place which produced
something like the present geographical arrangements, but still in
prehistoric times, times long before the beginning of history so far as
these islands are concerned, our islands were occupied by a race which
existed also in the north-west and extreme west of Europe. Herodotus knew
nothing of the existence of our islands; but he tells us that in his time
the people furthest to the west, nearer to the setting sun than even the
Celtae, were called Kynesii, or Kynetes. Archaeological investigations
shew that, though he did not know it, his statement covered our islands.
The people of whom he wrote were certainly here as well as on the western
parts of the continent. As some of us may have some of their blood in our
veins, we may leave others to discuss the question whether the names
Kynesii, Kynetes, mean "dog-men," and if so, what that implies. St. Jerome
in the course of his travels, say about 370 years after Christ, saw a body
of savage soldiers in the Roman army, brought from a part of what is now
Scotland--if an Englishman dare say such a thing; they were fed, he tells
us, on human flesh. The locality from which they came indicates that they
were possibly representatives of these earlier "dog-men," if that is