The rich diversity of thought and life in the ninth-century church may be illustrated by an inquiry concerning two dignitaries of the empire of Louis the Pious, Agobard of Lyons (769–840) and Amalarius of Metz (c. 780–c. 850). These two clerics, whose lives were virtually contemporaneous but whose careers crossed only once, during the interval 834–838, were almost as different as it is possible for two men to be; so different indeed that any contact they might have with each other would inevitably be sharply antagonistic. The single point at which their lives did meet was in effect an intellectual duel.

In most English minds, episcopal succession from the apostles is associated with the unbroken series of impositions of episcopal hands, stretching right back to certain layings-on of hands by apostles whereby the first bishops were set apart for an office that perpetuated something of apostolic authority. That this notion is thus prevalent is due to the Tractarians. Characteristic is their emphasis upon a particular action, the imposition of episcopal hands. Professor Einar Molland doubtless had this in his thought when, in the first issue of this Journal, he showed that Irenaeus, when upholding the importance of a regular and continuous succession from the apostles, laid no such emphasis on the imposition of episcopal hands. Professor Molland went on to indicate that Irenaeus himself cannot have received episcopal consecration at the hands of bishops. Only his fellow-presbyters of the Rhône valley can have solemnized his succession to the office of the martyred Pothinus. Professor Molland says, ‘Irenaeus may have been consecrated in the same way as the bishops of Alexandria’. It is probable that a majority of scholars hold the opinion that the early bishops of Alexandria received their episcopal office at the hands of their fellow-presbyters. Nevertheless Bishop Gore claimed that the opinion had not become a certainty, even after the discovery of the support it receives from Severus of Antioch. Gore saw clearly what were the consequences as touching the nature of valid episcopal succession, and endeavoured to maintain doubt concerning the fact of presbyteral ‘consecration’ at Alexandria.

In the current standard text-book of English Church Law appear the following statements about the origin of Convocation: ‘The Convocation, in its origin, was for the purpose of taxation and no other; it was altogether unlike the Convocation of the foreign synods, which were composed solely of the bishops, collected to declare what was the doctrine, or what should be the discipline, of the Church. It is easy, however, to conceive how the clergy, when once convoked, gradually assumed the same power as existed in those foreign synods to which their Convocation might appear to bear some analogy.’ In examining this quotation we must consider, (a) the composition of the foreign synods; (b) their relation if any to the English Convocation; (c) the taxing functions of both bodies.

Up till now the Egyptian government has not succeeded in arranging the purchase of the manuscripts forming the library of a Gnostic community living in the fourth century a.d. near the old site of Khenoboskion in Upper Egypt. But thanks to some preliminary studies we know the titles of the works copied in those manuscripts. When once these most important texts have been published we shall know much more about what the Egyptian Gnostics thought and taught in the fourth century in Upper Egypt.

It has long been a commonplace of Scottish ecclesiastical history that the culdees at St. Andrews, who held a place in the cathedral church in the earlier part of the twelfth century, survived for a further two hundred years. The most authoritative statement of this belief is still to be found in the work of Dr. William Reeves (later Bishop of Down), whose paper on ‘The Culdees of the British Islands’ was read to the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin in 1860, and published there as a book in 1864. Reeves's paper discussed very fully the origins and later history of the culdees in the British Isles, especially in Ireland and Scotland; and it is of some interest to recall that since the author was a vicar-choral of Armagh cathedral he belonged to a corporation which could claim to have directly represented, since the seventeenth century, the older body of culdees attached to the mother church of St. Patrick.

The character of abbot William Wallingford of St. Albans (abbot 1476–92), the state of the abbey under his rule, and the issue of his controversy with archbishop Morton in 1490, provided matter for a lively controversy at the beginning of the present century which has recently found an echo in a posthumous work of the late Dr. G. G. Coulton. Despite considerable research, much has hitherto remained obscure, and the so-called ‘St. Albans case’ has remained an obstacle in the path of all students of the last phase of pre-Reformation monasticism. The present writer some years ago, in the course of other work, attempted a review of the problem, but subsequently put aside what he had written, as Dr. Coulton had declared, both in print and in conversation, that he intended to give a full treatment of the case in the last volume of his Five Centuries of Religion. This, when at last it appeared in the autumn of 1950, was found indeed to contain two chapters on Wallingford and St. Albans, but these, when carefully considered, appeared neither to give a final judgment nor to provide a clear presentation of the sequence of events and of the difficulties of interpretation presented by the documents. Coulton's pages, in fact, so far from speaking the last word, give the impression of being a series of notes never fully resolved into an ordered narrative or argument and, in addition, there is more than one omission or misplacement in important footnote references, possibly due to uncorrected slips in the typescript of the book, which leave the reader at a loss.

Until comparatively recently the origins of the movement known as the devotio moderna attracted curiously little attention in this country. It was judged too medieval and too orthodox in character to have had much influence upon the course of reform, and the Anglican habit of relating all reforming movements to the Reformation did not allow it its rightful place in the history of the Christian spiritual life; from another angle, the sarcasms of Erasmus in his Compendium Vitae cast doubts about the disinterestedness of its teaching, and raised among humanists suspicions that its aims and methods were ultimately obscurantist. Its reforming activities were mainly associated with the efforts of a single wing of, or group within, the movement that aimed at reforming the religious houses along the lines of the Augustinian convents of Agnetenburg and Windesheim, and small attention was paid to its appeal to the laity and its attempt to combat self-satisfied materialism among the prosperous middle classes in the towns. And the fact that it was, at any rate in its beginning, essentially a local movement, confined in the main to the western part of the ecclesiastical province of Cologne, still further confined its appeal.

For several decades the reputation of eighteenth-century religion has been rising. Where the Victorians saw on the whole only apathy and even cynicism, their successors have found that the sober goodwill, rising at times to a luminous devotion, which characterises much Hanoverian worship still makes its appeal. Yet our conversion is not (and never can be) complete, and it is still widely felt that the Victorian indictment was right, viz. that the people had forsaken the fountain of living waters.

Bancroft's celebrated sermon was delivered at St. Paul's Cross on 9 February 1588/9. Two editions appeared in England during the summer. The protests from English Puritans—Dr Reynolds of Oxford University, Sir Francis Knollys—soon died away. Bancroft was denouncing the puritan movement more forcibly than it had been denounced, but so far as England was concerned he was saying nothing which had not already been said by Anglican controversialists like John Whitgift, John Bridges, Thomas Cooper. The novelty of the sermon lay in its attitude to foreign churches. The presbyterian movement in England claimed the support of the protestant churches in Scotland, Holland, the Rhineland, Switzerland. Bancroft was not afraid to transform the denunciation of presbyterianism in England into a denunciation of Presbyterianism in general.

The East India Company's accession to political and administrative responsibility in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was greatly complicated by the simultaneous development of the evangelical movement in England with its missionary agents overseas. India was one of the first areas of British expansion to feel the pressure of evangelical influence upon the conduct of its government. South Africa was to take its turn soon afterwards, and in both cases the younger Charles Grant played an important part, through his tenure of the offices of President of the Board of Control and Colonial Secretary.

Research work in Swedish Church History of the Vasa period, (1523–1654), i.e. the period of the reformation and early orthodoxy, carried on during the two decades from 1918 to 1938, was exhaustively reviewed by Hjalmar Holmquist in ‘Forschungen zur Kirchengeschichte Schwedens in der Wasazeit (1523–1654). Sammelbericht über die Epoche 1918–1938’ (Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, ed. G. Ritter, No. 36, Leipzig 1939). Swedish research in Church History for the period 1914–20 is listed by G. Krüger in his article ‘Literature on Church History in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Holland and the Scandinavian Countries, 1914–1920’ in the Harvard Theological Review, xiv. (1921), xv. (1922), xvii. (1924), and xviii. (1925). The list of literature for Sweden was contributed by H. Pleijel of Lund.