The ecclesiastical history of Britain is generally made to commence, after some conjectural hypotheses as to the original preaching of Christianity, with the celebrated conversion of a king named Lucius, in the latter part of the second century. The two writers on our ecclesiastical antiquities who have most claim to deference for learning, as one of them has for critical judgment, Usher and Stillingfleet, as well as those of a secondary, yet respectable character, such as Collier, unite in receiving this as an authentic fact. Yet some have always been found to doubt, among whom we may place Whitaker and Henry, as rather more peremptory than the rest; the former being certainly not over sceptical in matters of historical tradition. But Dr. Lingard and many others of our contemporaries, though under the necessity of moulding the story into a less questionable shape than it has come down to us, have not ventured to reject the whole as a fable, or to deny that a certain king during the reigns of the Antonines was the means of spreading the light of the Gospel over a part at least of our island, after having sought and received instruction at the hands of the Bishop of Rome.