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 its directions for the procedure to be followed at the consecration of a bishop, the document now generally accepted as the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus of Rome contains, as is well known, the text of an anaphora or eucharistic prayer. Apart from several phrases, preserved in the anaphora of Apostolic Constitutions viii, the original Greek of the prayer attributed to Hippolytus is lost. For its textual basis, therefore, we must turn to what is clearly the most faithful version of the original, as well as the oldest, the Latin of the Verona palimpsest recovered by E. Hauler and published by him in 1900. The anaphora is here introduced by the traditional dialogue consisting of ‘Dominus vobiscum’, ‘Susum corda’ and ‘Gratias agamus domino’, and their responses.

When Jean Lemaire de Belges composed his Traité de la différence des schismes et des conciles de l'eglise in 1511, the purpose of the text was to support Louis XII in his struggle with Pope Julius II, to promote the conciliar ideology which the French king was exploiting, and in general to set Christian kings and emperors in favourable contrast with the popes of Rome. Read beside vernacular texts by other authors – Jean Bouchet, Pierre Gringore, Jean Marot, Jean d'Auton – who were writing during France's war with Julius II, it appears more effective propaganda and in some ways bolder and more far-reaching. However, the contrast is not sufficient to mark its author out as heterodox in comparison with the rest, two of whom, Bouchet and Gringore, were later to attack Lutheranism with some vigour. Lemaire's text established itself as an acceptable Gallican–monarchical view of history. It sold well and was printed twice in both 1511 and 1512. It continued to be printed after the crisis which produced it had abated. Increasingly it was included in the collections of Lemaire's works which remained popular long after the author himself dropped out of public view in about 1515. As the Lutheran Reformation developed readers brought new perceptions to the text, and we may deduce a sharpened sense of its relevance from a new edition which appeared in Lyons in 1532. Romain Morin published the text in a new small format, and with a new title, Le Promptuaire des conciles de l'eglise catholique, avec les scismes et la difference d'iceulx. The text itself was very little modified. Morin himself reissued the Promptuaire in 1533 and ten years later Paris printers took it up, showing that the text continued popular in France into the 1550s, when it was finally placed on the Sorbonne's list of forbidden books.

We have learnt long since that the pioneers of humanism in early Renaissance Italy are not to be regarded as atheists, pagans, or even non-conformists. Some might be cynical about the institutional and political Church with which as Italians, and not infrequently as ecclesiastical employees, they were all too familiar, but they were not looking to disturb the Church in its role as one of the pillars of established society. If as intellectuals they were critical of the language and philosophical apparatus in which the Church had elaborated its doctrines, this did not usually imply scepticism of the revealed truths that were presumed to be enshrined in dogma or rejection of the rituals and practices of the Church, whatever dangers to the faith conservatives might claim to see in their classical enthusiasm. Among these familiar and respected practices, to the early humanists as to their contemporaries, was the veneration of the saints. Old saints were venerated and new saints made in fifteenth-century Italy as elsewhere, and occasionally they furnished subjects to a man classifiable by his education and professional expertise as a humanist.

In any evaluation of the character and accomplishments of the English Reformation, an essential ingredient must be a sympathetic but, so far as possible, objective assessment of the nature – in all its strengths and weaknesses – of the unreformed Church and religion upon which the Reformation was wrought. Among the multifarious operations of the pre-Reformation Church, perhaps the most central to its fundamental purposes was the conduct by its clergy of the worship of God and the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass, as effected on the small scale by the parish clergy and on the grand scale by the priests and clerks of the greater collegiate churches and the religious of the monasteries. As acts of worship, commemoration and intercession, the efficacy of these rituals lay in the simple fact of their enactment by those to whom their conduct was committed, irrespective of the grandeur of the setting or the presence or absence of any congregation or other attendance. Nevertheless, credit both terrestrial and celestial was perceived to redound upon those institutions which endeavoured to clothe their acts of devotion and worship with the finest products that the artisans of the day could create, within the grandest achievements of their contemporary architects. In respect of the conduct of the liturgy, it was, in the event, those institutions which had carried these arts to their highest levels that eventually proved to be the principal casualties of the Reformation process; a period of less than fifteen years (1535–49) sufficed to effect the extinction of all the monastic churches, and of all the collegiate churches except for some thirty which enjoyed cathedral status, academic function or extremely close royal connection.

Among the many forms which were used by the early Church to accompany the baptismal washing we may certainly count those forms which are at present in use in the eastern and western Church. At a later stage in this study we shall examine their origin and ancestry. First it is necessary to draw attention to certain other forms which are attested by the Fathers in their writings and liturgical remains, and which appear to have been invested at one time with the same importance and to have fulfilled the same purpose as the formula which is universally used to-day.

Hard feeling between the mendicant and secular clergy no doubt persisted throughout the later middle ages, but at certain moments passions flared up, sermons were preached, pamphlets written, and chroniclers took notice. About a hundred years after the quarrel in which archbishop FitzRalph of Armagh was involved (1356–9), Londoners again had the opportunity to enjoy or deplore a rather similar scene This time, if the Continuator of Gregory's Chronicle was right, ‘the Whyte Freers be-ganne hyt fryste.’ By public preaching of the old thesis that Christ and his Apostles were beggars who possessed nothing of their own, the Carmelites thought to enhance their own status in the eyes of the world. Their arguments were not very subtle, but then neither, it may be thought, were their aims; yet if the actors themselves now seem to strut and fret past reason, their play is full of interest, and this not only, for the historian of church affairs or theological ideas, but for anyone who cares to know more about the details of public life and the divisions of public opinion in Edward IV's London.

The year 1961 witnesses the centenary of the Deaconess Community of St. Andrew, the only Religious Community in the Anglican Church whose full members are both professed Religious and ordained Deaconesses. In 1861, Elizabeth Catherine Ferard, with two like-minded ladies, began to live together under a common rule of life, dedicated to worship and to works of mercy. In July of the following year, the bishop of London ‘set apart’ Miss Ferard as the first deaconess of the English Church. Thus began the Community of Deaconesses, expanding and developing during the ensuing hundred years, but from the beginning maintaining its characteristic two-fold vocation to the Religious Life and to the Order of Deaconesses.