Chapters of early English church history Author:William Bright Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Pelagianism in Britain. 15 a promontory of Wigtownshire, and built a church, not, as was usual among Britons, of wood, but, in the Roman fashion, of stone,—on... more » account of which, as Bede tells us, the place was called the White House, 'Candida Casa1,' otherwise Whithern,—where now a ruined cathedral, crowning a wooded mound, represents what was once emphatically named ' the Great Monastery2,' and Toiown as a centre of religious light and strength for all who dwelt along the Sol way and between the two Roman ' walls,' and even for those 'Southern Picts3' whose proper district extended from the Forth to the great range of hills called the Mounth, which crosses our present Scotland between Ben Nevis and Stonehaven. So it was that in after-ages St. Ninian was commemorated as the instrument by whom the ' Picts and Britons' had been ' converted to the knowledge of the faith4.' Those early years of the fifth century, during which Ninian was in his prime of work5, witnessed the origin of a momentous controversy which went far to impair, in the eyes of zealous continental theologians, the reputation of the British Church for simple-hearted orthodoxy. When Pelagius became obnoxious by speculations offensive to Christian piety, he was generally known as ' the Briton 6,' impressed by, the groat missionary bishop of Gaul, St. Martin of Tours,— and in his memory the 'white' church was hallowed ; Bede, l. c. 1 Bede, iii. 4. Comp. v. 21 ; Hist. Abb. 5. Whithern, however, was perhaps the Leucopibia (probably Leukoikidia) of Ptolemy. ' Hwit sern ' = 'white cell.' Guest, Orig. Celt. ii. 302. It was also called Futerm1 and Rosnut. On the sculptures at Kirkmadrine in Wigtownshire— two stones with the Christian monogram, one having also the names of ' the priests Viventius and Mavorius ' (or ...« less