, they finish them
with less than the strength of women."

The line taken by a recent writer, Professor W. M. Ramsay, in his most
interesting and able book, "The Church in the Roman Empire," traverses
this argument about the Galatian Epistle. In opposition to the great
divine who for eight years spoke from this pulpit, and made this Epistle a
special study for a great part of his life, Professor Ramsay maintains, by
arguments drawn from geographical and epigraphical facts not known thirty
years ago, when Dr. Lightfoot first wrote, that the Epistle was addressed
to the people in the southern part of the Roman province called Galatia,
who were not Galatians at all; and was not addressed to those in the
northern part, who were Galatians proper, and occupied the whole of the
country named from them Galatia. But I use the illustration,
notwithstanding this. The controversy is not quite ended yet; and I do not
feel sure that the difficulties of the Epistle itself, from Professor
Ramsay's point of view, are very much less considerable than those which
Dr. Lightfoot's view undoubtedly has to face. In any case the Galatians
proper were of close kin with the more civilised of our British
predecessors--ancestors we may perhaps say--and this at least gives us a
personal interest in what at first sight would seem to be a very far-off
controversy.

The tradition which used to find most favour was that Joseph of Arimathea
came over with twelve companions, and received from a British king in the
south-west a portion of land for each of his companions, and founded the
ecclesiastical establishment of Glastonbury. There is certainly some very
ancient history connected with the "twelve hides" of Glastonbury. Go as
far back as we will in the records, we never come to the beginning of the
"xii. hidae." The Domesday Survey tells us, eight hundred years ago, that
the twelve hides "never have been taxed." Clearly they take us back to
some very early donation; and I see no reason--beyond the obvious
difficulty of its geographical remoteness--against the tradition that here
was the earliest Christian establishment in Britain. At the Council of
Basle, in 1431, when the Western Church was holding councils with a view
to reforming from within the enormous abuses of the Roman Court, a prelude
to the "Reformation" into which we were driven a hundred years later, the
precedence of churches was determined by the date of their foundation. The
English Ch