A commonplace which arises early and persists long in patristic literature is that doctrinal aberrations are generally traceable to the influence of Greek philosophical schools. But particularly in Epicureanism do the Fathers find a useful club with which to beat an astonishing variety of heretics.

It will be convenient to mention at the outset the way in which Origen ascribes to Epicurean influence the unorthodox views of his pagan opponent, Celsus. The opinions of Celsus in which Origen claims to detect latent Epicureanism concern a variety of topics.

The recent publication of Mr. Nicholl's ‘Life’ of Thurstan, archbishop of York (1114–1140), has made this subject once more topical: and, indeed, for twelfth-century historians at least it will always be interesting. One of the constant themes of the century, and of the 1120s and 1130s in particular, was the question of the state, position and purpose of monks. The ‘monastic centuries’ were ending and the age of the secular masters had begun. The social purposes that the monasteries had served in the tenth and eleventh centuries were becoming less obvious and outdated. It was necessary that the position of the whole monastic order in society should be reconsidered and this roused strong feelings and bitter controversy. This controversy took place not only outside the monasteries but inside them as well and the great abbey of St. Mary's York is one of the houses where such controversy can be seen and studied.

The second English delegation to the Council of Basel arrived there in August 1434 and remained until the summer of the following year. Its members, unlike their predecessors in the delegation of 1433, took the oath of incorporation and the brief period of their attendance was virtually the extent of England's official participation in the council. The purpose of this article is to re-examine the episode of the second delegation of which no comprehensive account has appeared since Dr. August Zellfelder published his study of England and the council in 1913.

‘About that time [1567–8] there were many congregations of the Anabaptists in London, who called themselves Puritans or Unspotted Lambs of the Lord. They kept their church in the Minories without Aldgate’.

This paper is an attempt to develop the clue handed down to us by John Stow to the location of an early—if not the earliest—thoroughgoing nonconformist congregation within the Elizabethan Church. Considering the length of time it has been in print, it is a clue strangely neglected by historians both of nonconformity and of London during this period.

The county of Chester between 1750 and 1850 affords an interesting field of study into the impact on religion of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent great, mainly urban, population growth. In the east where the Cheshire plain swells to low foothills, which in turn give way to the gaunt moorlands and windswept heights of the Pennines, in the early stages of the Revolution factory villages were established in places where streams provided water power; in the lower part of the curious salient of the county which sunders Lancashire from Derbyshire by thrusting up to Holme Moss, cotton mills, print works, and collieries sprang up as the basis of a fairly dense population in what had hitherto been a district of small importance. By 1800 Stockport with its power spinning and hand weaving of cotton, its bleaching, printing, and hatting industries, had surpassed the ancient city of Chester in population. Ten miles to the south lay Macclesfield in which the older manufacture of silk buttons had been largely eclipsed by silk throwing and weaving. In a maturer phase of the Revolution, from about 1820, for the first time the western part of the county became involved. The expanding population of Liverpool crossed the Mersey in the recently introduced steam ferries to occupy the opposite shore at Birkenhead. Until that time the Wirral peninsular (of which Birkenhead is a part) had remained remote and undeveloped and notably conservative in religion. In 1850 the rest of the county, interspersed with quiet country towns such as Northwich, Knutsford and Congleton, was still overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. Thus, Cheshire affords within itself a contrasting variety of rural life and of earlier and later industrialism.

Among the evangelical leaders who flourished in the middle of the nineteenth century, surprisingly little has been written about J. C. Miller, who attained in Birmingham the same degree of importance as McNeile in Liverpool and Stowell in Manchester. He never became a bishop or a dean, no one wrote an official biography of him, and except for an article in the Dictionary of National Biography information about him is not readily available.