Christian ethics is not a matter of fixed and unchangeable laws. If we are to study its history we must follow a story of development and trace the evidence of an evolution. This is not something that should shock us as though its development were something that puts in question its changeless value. On the contrary, its value is confirmed by its evolution, because Christian ethics is essentially dynamic. From this intrinsic dynamism we are constantly pushed forward. As Christians we live under one commandment, the commandment of love given by Jesus himself which is the centre of the dynamism. If Christian ethics becomes static, it contradicts its very nature. Far from being a tradition that is to be upheld from age to age, Christian ethics is the means of criticising the traditions of every age and a means of searching lines of development for the future.

At first sight Athenagoras's treatment of Christian ethics in his Supplicatio pro Christianis xi and xii appears to be anti-philosophical. According to Athenagoras the Christian way of life is based on doctrines taught by God and not by man. Ethical precepts are not derived from dialectical exercises, but are Christian dogmas which come from God and through Scripture (xi p. 128, 11 ff.). The basis for his discussion of Christian ethics is a conflation of Mt. v. 44 f. and Lk. vi. 28 (xi p. 128, 14 ff.). This represents a change in his method of argumentation from his earlier theological discussion (vi–x) where he proceeded on the basis of reasoning (λογισμοὐς) which was then confirmed by Scripture (ix p. 126, 29 ff.). Furthermore, for him ethics is motivated by a knowledge of the Trinity (xii p. 129, 17 ff.) and is the following of correct knowledge governed by an expectation of the Judgment (xii p. 129, 3 ff.). However, Geffcken and Ubaldi have shown that Athenagoras uses certain philosophical traditions in this discussion, and that his attack on the sophists was in good philosophical form. This article will examine Athenagoras's method of argument to determine more clearly what philosophical models he did in fact use.

In 1950 the late Professor Ratcliff published in the first two numbers of this Journal an article entitled ‘The Sanctus and the Pattern of the Early Anaphora’. In it he argued that the recitation of the Sanctus formed the climax and doxology of the primitive Eucharistic Prayer. At the end of the article he wrote, ‘Why, if the pattern of the ancient Anaphora ever conformed with the reconstruction proposed here, was the pattern abandoned? The surviving literature, and not least the historic liturgies, either supply the answers or offer evidence which suggests them. A consideration of the questions and answers, however, must be reserved for a future article’.

Ockhamism was a radical restatement of the relation of revealed truth to natural experience. Its force lay in the systematic application—one might say exploitation—of the different criteria appropriate to each. That they were different was universally accepted; but not until Ockham were their differences methodically shown to be unassimilable. The reasons were not only epistemological; they were also theological. The limits to natural knowledge set by Ockham's insistence upon verification had their counterpart in the absence of limits to God's omnipotence—save self-contradiction. Ockhamism was not just empiricism; it was an extreme restatement of Christian belief in divine omnipotence and the contingency of creation. The disruptive effects lay not in the belief itself but in the play upon it, especially by Ockham's followers.

Bishop Ermenfrid of Sion is chiefly familiar to English historians on account of his brief but important intervention in the Anglo-Norman kingdom in the year 1070. However, he occupied his see for more than thirty years during a momentous period of ecclesiastical and political history. Little evidence about him survives, and it has never been fully assembled and discussed; yet it is enough to give more than passing interest to the course of his career and to the details of his activities. This is especially true of Anglo-Norman affairs, Ermenfrid's part in which needs to be explained and subjected to a detailed examination. But, more generally, the wider evidence about him deserves to be brought into the picture, for it sheds light on some of the factors which governed men's minds and loyalties in the second half of the eleventh century.

Lord Acton believed that there was a dichotomy in English history between the life expressed in the Church and the principle of nationality. It is evident from a study of the writings of John Wyclif (c. 1320–84) that at least one medieval English theologian asserted that a principle of English nationality was fused into the life of the English Church. Regardless of how the next fifty years of scholarship may judge the connexion in medieval Christianity between national traditions and the universal Church, the English aspect of it is important at present. Wyclif provided the original impetus to the Lollard movement. Increasing scholarly attention has been given to Lollardy and its possible influence on the English Reformation. It now seems important to survey systematically the texts of Wyclif's treatises themselves for what light they may shed on the relationship between ecclesiastical and temporal history in the English tradition.

Until comparatively recently, it was tacitly assumed that the supporters of the Council of Basle (1431–49) and of pope Eugenius IV (1431–47) had little to contribute to ecclesiology, and (with the exception of Nicholas of Cusa) virtually nothing to political thought. The Council of Constance has generally been taken as the climax of medieval ecclesiastical constitutionalism; and it seemed that the subject of papal sovereignty had been thoroughly exhausted in the previous centuries.

In 1541 the new bishopric of Chester was compounded of the archdeaconries of Richmond and Chester, severed respectively from the vast sees of York and Lichfield. The annexing of Chester to Richmond, though not originally intended, seemed reasonable on geographical grounds, since they had a common boundary, the Ribble, in Lancashire. It may have been prompted also by the fact that since 1529 Dr. William Knight had held both archdeaconries in plurality, so that their surrender (for which he received the see of Bath and Wells) presented no great difficulties. As for the head of the diocese, Chester was the obvious place, having from 1075 to 1102 housed the cathedra which Lanfranc had moved from Lichfield; this brief elevation of Chester in the eleventh century was tenaciously commemorated long after the bishops had ceased to style themselves by that title in the 1140s, and as late as 1522 a royal minister in an official record could write of ‘the bishop of Chester’, meaning Blythe, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. Furthermore, Chester was the most substantial town in the proposed diocese and in it there was an institution fit to be a cathedral: St. Werburgh's abbey, of great antiquity and wealth, and lately dissolved. In Richmond archdeaconry the claims of Fountains abbey, at first seriously entertained, were jeopardised by its remote and sparsely inhabited location. Another factor, too, may have operated in the separation of Chester archdeaconry from the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, in its union with Richmond, and in its selection for the bishop's seat, for in some ways it had fitted as uncomfortably into that diocese as Richmond had into York.

In 1544, one Francesco Colonna, making his testament in Venice, wrote: ‘I recommend to Almighty God my being and my soul, and when it is his pleasure to remove me from this life, I am content; knowing that in this life I can do no good thing, but rather that I shall always offend his majesty. If I have ever said a word or performed a deed that was pleasing to him, I know that I have always been impelled and moved by the Holy Spirit, when I have had any good thought, desire or wish, I have always recognised it to be from him and through his grace alone and whenever I have willed to conduct myself by my blind judgment, presumptive wisdom and diabolical spirit, I have always done the contrary and offended his divine majesty. I leave all, therefore, to God, the Supreme Father … and should he wish to take away all that he has given me, there would remain my sins alone, for these sins are mine and all other things are his; if I go with these sins before God, I am damned, if I wish to make satisfaction, I cannot. Indeed there is no saint who can take my sins for his and satisfy and placate the wrath of God, nor is there anyone who can do so save Jesus Christ. To him, therefore, I leave all my wretched thoughts, desires and acts and all my sins, past, present and future. I make a bundle of them and give them to Jesus Christ my Lord, with the certain faith and constant hope that he will, out of sublime charity, accept them for his.’

Richard Bancroft's Paul's Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/9 owes its fame to the fact that it has traditionally been associated with the first appearance in Anglican theology of the jure divino theory of episcopacy. So far as I have been able to discover, this tradition appears to derive its origin from the account of the Sermon given by John Strype in the eighteenth century, although the germ of the idea is considerably older, since it can be traced back to the attacks made at the time by Bancroft's puritan opponents, most notably Sir Francis Knollys, who accused him, along with archbishop Whitgift and others, of seeking to undermine the Royal Supremacy by preaching that bishops owed their ‘superiority’ over the lower clergy to God rather than to the queen. Until the eighteenth century, however, this interpretation of Bancroft's teaching is only to be found in puritan writers. Seventeenth-century Anglican church historians in general do not appear to have attached any doctrinal significance to the Sermon. Peter Heylyn, for example, in his Aërius Redivivus (1670) refers to it as ‘a most excellent and judicious Sermon’ and proceeds to give a lengthy summary of its contents without at any point suggesting that Bancroft was putting forward a novel theory of episcopacy, while Thomas Fuller makes no reference to it at all either in his Church History of Britain (1655) or in his account of Bancroft in The Worthies of England (1662). At the beginning of the eighteenth century the Sermon enjoyed a modest vogue among the Non-Jurors, who admired it for its vigorous defence of the Church of England against the attacks of the puritans; but neither Henry Gandy, who reprinted it at the instigation of Dr. George Hickes in the first volume of the Bibliotheca Scriptorum Ecclesiae Anglicanae (1709), nor Jeremy Collier, who discussed it at considerable length in his Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (1709-14), drew any explicit connexion between the Sermon and the emergence of the jure divino theory of episcopacy.

Sir James Graham's Factory Bill of 1843 has been examined from varied viewpoints by several writers. Partly planned as a legislative antidote to the conditions which had helped to provoke the ‘Plug Plot’ riots of 1842, the measure was important for two reasons: it would both considerably improve earlier textile factory reforms and provide reasonable education for child-workers. On both counts and on all sides it provoked major controversy.

During the First Vatican Council Lord Acton stayed in Rome as a private observer and sent to his friends Gladstone and Döllinger lengthy reports on the proceedings of the Council. Some of his letters to Döllinger were published in the prominent liberal newspaper Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung under the pseudonym ‘Quirinus’. These sensational reports, which are said to have won to the Allgemeine the considerable number of ten thousand new subscribers, were published afterwards in a single volume. An English translation by H. N. Oxenham appeared in 1870 from Rivingtons. The importance of the Quirinus letters, of which Döllinger was the main contributor, lies in the fact that they were the most detailed and best informed reports on the Council's proceedings. Though journalistic in style and approach they were qualitatively far beyond average since both contributors, Acton and Döllinger, were trained historians of international respectability. Since the publication of Acton's private correspondence with Döllinger it has been possible to distinguish more clearly in the Quirinus letters between journalism and historical fact. We will deal in what follows with Lord Acton's contribution to these letters in order to reach a better understanding of his interpretation of infallibility.