Note 346 — Chapter X · THE CHURCH.

It is difficult to conceive how the sister of the Pannonian Martin could have been the wife of the British Calphurnius; and the story probably arose from the spiritual relationship of St. Martin to the Apostle of Ireland. Ninian, the converter of the southern Picts, is also sometimes called a nephew of Martin. The dedication of the churches of Canterbury, Whithern, and Hereford, with the Irish Abbey at Cologne, to St. Martin, together with “the Gospel of St. Martin,” long preserved at Derry, and supposed to have been brought from Tours by St. Patrick, attest the veneration in which the name of the founder of monachism in Gaul was held throughout Britain and Ireland in early times.