It is no secret that the great orthodox ecclesiastical historians of the fourth and fifth centuries were purveyors of the new Christian imperial ideology. They as much as any group of writers laid the foundations of Byzantinism, by demonstrating from the course of events how it paid for emperors to be pious according to the prescriptions of the Catholic tradition, or how much better it was for the security, prosperity and destiny of the Roman Empire when the state and the (true) Church were consonant and false religion abandoned. So successful was the campaign in which they were engaged that by the sixth century, even though virtually all the Western provinces had fallen into barbarian hands, a clash between Church and State had become unthinkable, and no other ‘single hope for the permanency of the Empire’ had become possible but ‘the favour of God Himself, as Justinian, the energetic champion of reunification, proclaimed to all his successors.1 Such sentiments were in large measure the results of the works of those who had created attractive historical images of good Christian rulers.2 It was above all Eusebius Pamphilus, Tyrannius Rufinus, Socrates ‘Scholasticus’, Salmaninius Sozomen, Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Gelasius of Cyzicus who bequeathed to future generations an unblemished, idealised picture of Pax Constantiniana, a paradigm also reinforced by other Christian historians such as Lactantius and Athanasius.3 It was Rufinus who set the

Count Gerald of Aurillac (855–909) might seem rather out of place in a gallery of medieval saints: an aristocratic warrior, a great lord, Gerald seemed very much a man of this world rather than a saint in ascetic withdrawal from it. This was also the initial opinion of his biographer, who is, as far as this article is concerned, effectively his maker since we shall be dealing only with the ‘textual’ Gerald and not the historical one. This biographer, no less a figure than Abbot Odo of Cluny (879–942), began his Vita of Gerald (c. 930) by saying that many people doubted that Gerald was a saint. The opening words of Odo's Praefatio are quite explicit and perhaps rather surprising: ‘many people tend to doubt whether what is said about the blessed Gerald is true. And quite a lot of these people say that these stories are not only not true but fantastic.’ Originally Odo himself had not been too certain of Gerald's saintliness, though by the time he came to write the Vita he was convinced enough.2 The problem lay in convincing others.

Among the Puritan ‘martyrs’ celebrated by Samuel Clarke and Daniel Neal, few have been more frequently mentioned and less carefully considered than Richard Sibbes (1577–1635). Sibbes, primarily remembered as Preacher of Gray's Inn and author of The Bruised Reede, has been presented as one of a number of early Stuart preachers who neither approved nor practised bending the knee in communion, nor wearing the surplice, nor signing the cross in baptism, and yet who somehow remained within the Established Church. He was, it is reported, constantly troubled by Laud. Doubly deprived, censured and silenced, Sibbes became a model for his numerous disciples – among them Thomas Goodwin, John Davenport, John Cotton – who would later find their way into dissent. It is supposed that only the power of his lawyer-friends and noble patrons allowed him to retain his ministry at Gray's Inn for almost two decades. After his death, his writings became almost entirely the possession of Nonconformists and Sibbes came to be read through separatist spectacles. And yet, although remembered as espousing a robustly reformed theology, his moderation was particularly admired by those who followed him. Sibbes seemed to stand above the tumult of the times, ‘to preserve the vitals and essentials of religion, that the souls of his hearers, being captivated with the inward beauty and glory of Christ, and being led into an experimental knowledge of heavenly truths, theirspirits might not evaporate and discharge themselves in endless, gainless, soul-unedifying, and conscience-perplexing questions’.

The subject of this article claims attention for two special reasons. Firstly, and without any doubt, Grabe was one of the greatest atristic scholars of his age and lent lustre to the scholarly tradition at Oxford where his later years were spent. Secondly, his phenomenal patristic scholarship was inspired by a religious motive, which derived from his attachment to Lutheran Syncretism, a movement begun by the Helmstedt theologian Georg Calixtus (1586-1656). The problem of Grabe's neglect by historians is compounded by the confusion created by a contemporary account of the vital episode which brought him from Germany to Oxford and from Lutheranism to the Church of England. This article will therefore, draw together the scattered information which exists on Grabe's career and thereby remedy the neglect of historians, and dispel some of the confusion surrounding him.

Victorian Methodism was a religion of experience. More specifically, it was a religion of conversion experience. A personal, attested, conversion experience, undergone in a chapel, a mission hall or even the home, was an essential prerequisite of becoming a Methodist. Subsequently relived and dissected in a class meeting, it was a vital part of living as a Methodist. Finally, recounted and honoured in circuit obituaries and station records, it was posthumous testimony of the grace and fellowship accorded to an individual who had been a Methodist. For all that, it was a curiously unsystematised aspect of nineteenth-century Methodism. Contemporary doctrine, custom and practice taught that conversion experience was something which could, at least in theory, happen to anyone, at any time, in any place. It did not discriminate between social classes, between the sexes, even between the mature and the juvenile. Moreover it required, at least in principle, no act

In his essay ‘Judaism and Christianity in the ideology and politics of National Socialism’ Klaus Scholder outlined the basic principles of Hitler's world view and examined his perception of the relationship between Christianity and antisemitism. According to Hitler, there could be no doubt that Christian leaders, given the nature of their beliefs, should be active exponents of antisemitism. He revitalised the old motif of the Jews as ‘Christ killers’ and described Jesus as ‘a leader of the people’ who ‘opposed Jewry’. Because of this he had been murdered on the initiative of the Jews and the Jew Paul ’refined, falsified and exploited the teaching of the Galilean for his own ends’.