179. According to Tertullian, the Christian faith had
penetrated into parts of Britain inaccessible to the Roman
arms. About a century afterwards, Ossian, the son of Fingal,
is said to have disputed, in his extreme old age, with one
of the foreign missionaries, and the dispute is still extant
in verse, and in the Erse language. See Mr. Macpherson's
Dissertation on the Antiquity of Ossian's Poems, p. 10.