The recent extensive article on this subject by the distinguished French Scholar Dr. Jérome Carcopino provides an opportunity to return to a subject which I have already discussed in a paper published shortly before the War. Since its publication fresh evidence has come to light which may be thought to bear upon the subject, and various explanations of the origin of the square have been put forward which seem to invite comment. The exhaustive article of Fr. de Jerphanion, which is largely summarized by Carcopino, makes necessary only the briefest sketch of the development of our knowledge of the square. In its later form (beginning with Sator, fig. 2) it can be traced in a more or less complete form from the sixth century to modern times over an area extending from France to Ethiopia, Nubia, and even to South America, where its prophylactic virtues were accepted in the nineteenth century. The discovery of its earlier form (beginning with Rotas, fig. 1) incised on Roman wall-piaster at Cirencester in 1868 caused little interest, and it remained almost exclusively a matter for the medievalist for many years. In 1926 it was observed by Grosser that twenty-one of the letters of the square were made up of the word ‘Paternoster’ twice over (but necessarily arranged as a cross since the N, the middle letter, appears only once) and that the remaining four letters are two A's and two O's (fig. 4).

In his second article on the Pattern of the Early Anaphora Professor Ratcliff claims that the Eucharistic Prayer in the first ages of the Church ended with the singing of the Sanctus; and in a footnote on pages 130–1 he claims that ‘although the singing of the Sanctus by the people was a general usage in the fourth century, there is no reason to suppose that it was universal in the earlier centuries. “Amen” is the people's sole utterance according to Justin Martyr (Apol. 65, 67)’. But is there any positive evidence which would lead us to think that the Sanctus was sung, like the passage about Angels and Archangels which presumably preceded it, by the celebrant alone, and that the people merely sang ‘Amen’ at its conclusion? It is the purpose of this note to suggest that such evidence does exist, and that it supplies further evidence with regard to the text of the Sanctus in the Roman Eucharistic Prayer.

In recent years liturgiologists have abandoned the search for a primitive consecration prayer which was universally employed in the early Church. It is now realized that while the essential eucharistic action was everywhere the same, the way in which it was done, and the interpretation of what was being done, differed considerably in the local churches. There were, for example, many local peculiarities in the Syrian and Egyptian rites, some of which probably reflect differences in the interpretation of what was being done, that is to say, differences in doctrine. Development took place, and the old was sometimes allowed to remain alongside the new. Thus the liturgy of Sarapion reveals a double tradition with regard to the consecration.

Le Monothélisme était-il particulier aux seuls anciens Maronites? C'était, jusqu'ici, l'opinion régnante tant en Orient qu'en Occident. Or deux textes monothélites, appartenant aux anciens Melkites, viennent de voir le jour et jettent une nouvelle lumière sur cette question assez obscure. L'un fut révélé en 1945; nous allons faire connaître l'autre.

In the course of his work a medieval bishop was bound to collect a great number of archives. In the thirteenth century these included his register (the official record of his out-going letters and institutions), his visitation-rolls and lists of the persons whom he had ordained, as well as incoming letters which ranged in importance from papal bulls to complaints about the depredations of poachers. In the see of Lincoln it was the custom to classify the institutions and memoranda separately. Oliver Sutton is the first bishop whose memoranda survive, but we have the institution-rolls of the bishops from Hugh of Wells to Richard of Gravesend. Moreover Canon Foster has shown, from MSS. now in the munimentroom of the Dean and Chapter of Lincoln, that records of institutions were kept for the periods between the death of St. Hugh and the consecration of William of Blois, and between the death of Hugh of Wells and the consecration of Robert Grosseteste. The MSS. now existing, which Canon Foster dated about 1240, are not the original records made at the time of the institutions, but it appears probable, to judge by the care generally taken of the official rolls of the see, that such originals still survived in the time of Oliver Sutton. It is quite certain, from a reference in Sutton's register, that he possessed the memoranda of Bishop Gravesend, a MS. which is now lost.

It was probably during the thirteen-eighties that the Dominican Thomas Stubbs wrote his short lives of the Archbishops of York. A Yorkshireman, from the forest of Knaresborough, Stubbs had been a close acquaintance of Bishop Bury and Bishop Hatfield of Durham, both of whom, in earlier years, were members of the York chapter. He is therefore likely to have been well informed about his subject. His life of William Melton, archbishop from 1317 to 1340—under whom Bury had been chancellor of York—though laconic, is no merely formal piece. Its phrases suggest a comprehensive knowledge. Stubbs apparently wished to leave a distinctive impression of Melton. He tells his reader that the archbishop was severe in correcting rebels; that he kept a great household, and clothed it in his livery twice a year; that he would often cancel the amercements imposed on his tenants by his bailiffs, and would remit to the needy the farms and debts they owed him. Above all, Stubbs goes on, he frequently assisted the two kings, Edward II and Edward III, and the noble men of the land in their business, both with loans and with gifts—‘tarn ex mutuo quam ex dono’. Finally, Melton was an ardent promoter of his servants and of all his kinsmen.

When Richard Baxter arrived in the camp of the victorious New Model Army shortly after the battle of Naseby in June 1645, he was greatly distressed by the religious and political heterodoxies that found expression through the ‘few proud, self-conceited, hotheaded Sectaries’ who had become Cromwell's ‘Favourites’. He observed that these men held ‘vehement Disputes’ in behalf of ‘Liberty of Conscience’, the doctrine that the civil magistrate should have nothing to do with matters of religion. Furthermore, he noticed that they also talked of ‘State Democracy’ and ‘Church Democracy’ as well as ‘about Free-grace and Free-will, and all the Points of Antinomianism and Arminianism’. In other words, in Baxter's mind those men who were attacking the orthodox Calvinistic doctrines of predestination and election were the very same men who were demanding additional political liberties. A single test case may be framed of the compatibility and nurturing effect (each upon the other) of these two tendencies by an examination of the writings of the New Model Army chaplain, John Saltmarsh.

Archibald Campbell Tait, Fellow of Balliol College and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was sitting quietly in his room on Saturday morning 27 February 1841, when another Fellow of the College, William George Ward by name, burst in excitedly and threw down a pamphlet on the table with the exclamation ‘Here is something worth reading’. This pamphlet was Tract 90.