As stated in the Preface, the present work comprises within the compass of eight lectures the Bampton Lectures for 1941, a survey of the relation of the Papacy and the Christian ‘Church, paying particular attention to their character within the first six centuries. The spirit in which it is written is accurately set forth by the author when he writes : ‘It may be that by a fuller recognition of its (the papacy’s) status in the history of our Faith there will grow a more generous acknowledgement of its appropriate place in the glorious reunited Christendom of the future.’ It is the eirenic spirit of theology, which in historical matters means a benevolent neutrality.

And we do need books of this kind. In the Catholic Church, most of our ecclesiastical history has been dealt with as a department of Apologetics and few are the Catholic historians detached enough to allow for the human element in the communion of saints. It seems so difficult for one who loves the Church as a son to reveal her past as a historian; or for one who reverenced her as divine to analyse such of her actions as are obviously human. Outsiders, of course, labour under the same difficulty the other way about and often fail to see the divine wood for the human trees. In medio Hat virtus.

Anglican historians of the Roman Catholic Church are fewer even than their Catholic opposite numbers, but few as they are, they substantially assist us in the arduous task of stating facts without bias either for or against the Church, of showing the possibility of criticising with love and reverence, of discerning the divine without overlooking the human.