Tatian, the second century Christian apologist, is something of an enigma to students of early Christian history and doctrine. How far was he influenced by his teacher Justin Martyr? What caused him to become an extreme exponent of the encratite heresy? Did his heretical views only develop after Justin's death, and were these the cause of his leaving Rome? or were these views only a development of tendencies which existed from the beginning? The answers which we give to these questions will largely depend on the view we take of, and the date we assign to, the one apologetic work of his which is extant—his Oration to the Greeks, a violent polemic against Graeco-Roman culture in the course of which Tatian reveals, in somewhat cryptic manner, his own theological views and gives a brief account of his own spiritual pilgrimage.

The immediate purpose of this article is narrative, in particular its aim is to draw attention to two little-known incidents in the early life of William of Corbeil, archbishop of Canterbury (1123–36) and to a rearrangement of the chronology of the Canterbury-York dispute in the 1120s, and, in general, to tell part of the story of that dispute again. The story is worth telling because it is colourful and dramatic and crowded with incident, because it is almost all that we know of a remote and thinly-documented period of English Church history, and because it marks an entirely new interest in English affairs on the part of the popes, who took part in the dispute with an energy and effect unparallelled since the seventh century. Despite (or perhaps because of) the excellence of the sources—Eadmer, monk of Canterbury, and Hugh, precentor of York—the story has only once been told at all fully for its most important period, that from 14 August 1114 to 9 December 1128—by Mr. Nicholl, in his recently published ‘Life’ of Thurstan, archbishop of York (1114–40). Naturally, he concentrated on Thurstan, the greater man of the two, the man with the better case, the victor in the dispute, of whom much more is known. This article is intended to give a brief synopsis of the early life of the loser, to tell of his early introduction to the dispute and his eventual part in it.

The coronation of Edward VII at the beginning of this century was an unfamiliar scene in Westminster Abbey after the long rule of Victoria, and it elicited a spate of scholarly investigations into those ancient ceremonies. As one of the minor fruits of this renewed interest, a controversy was carried on concerning the ceremonial of the coronation of Elizabeth I on 15 January 1559. Three questions occupied the centre of the stage: Who celebrated the mass: Owen Oglethorpe, the bishop who anointed and crowned her, or George Carew, the priest whom she had made dean of the Chapel Royal? Were the consecrated elements elevated during the canon of the mass? Did Elizabeth withdraw during the consecration to the chapel of St. Edward behind the high altar?

The methods of appointment to English sees in the later Middle Ages are not of a kind to give assurance that the men chosen as bishops would be concerned to exercise pastoral care and give undivided attention to the daily routine of diocesan administration. This is not to deny that from time to time men so concerned did reach the Episcopal bench, but their numbers are small indeed, and seldom was the length of an episcopate such as to enable even the most assiduous bishop to make a significant impact on the remoter areas of dioceses too extensive for the available means of travel and communication. But to Worcester in the last month of 1443 was provided John Carpenter, who was to rule the see for some thirty-two years, whose absences from it, though frequent, were of relatively brief duration, and who seems to have entertained a deep personal concern for its affairs and the spiritual and temporal welfare of its people. The very bulk of his register—in two volumes—one substantial the other only less so—serves to provide a detailed prospect of diocesan activity in the middle years of the fifteenth century.

The Rev. H. D. Leeves, recently appointed as the British and Foreign Bible Society's first full time agent in the Levant, arrived in Constantinople in January 1821. Before this time the Society's interests in Turkey had been promoted at different times by the Rev. Robert Pinkerton; the Rev. Henry Lindsay, Chaplain to the Embassy in Constantinople; and the Rev. James Connor, an agent of the Church Missionary Society. Within a short time of his arrival Leeves was reporting to the Committee in London on the position with regard to the Society's proposed edition of the New Testament in Karamanlidika, that is, in Turkish printed with Greek characters. In a letter of 8 February 1821 he reported that ‘the transcription of the Turkish Testament, in Greek characters, has advanced very little. This is upon the whole fortunate, and I think it will be best to suspend it entirely until the corrected edition is ready. The Secretary to the Patriarch (i.e., Alexander Petropolis), who has undertaken this work, has so little time to spare, that I believe it will be necessary to look out for another person to perform it, when the amended copy is ready to be put into his hands’.

Although the thought of Augustine and Pascal and their way of positing philosophical and theological problems differ widely from eeach other, there are important elements which seem to call for comparison. For Augustine caritas is the hallmark of knowledge of God, and only when this is experienced will that knowledge be true.

The study of local history can contribute much to the understanding of religious changes in the nineteenth century, for, as Professor Asa Briggs has shown, each provincial city of Victorian England had its own distinguishing class structure and manner of life. Nonconformity was strong in Birmingham and Sheffield, towns of the steel and iron industry which was largely in the hands of small masters; Manchester with its cotton mills, its large proletariat and Irish immigrants, its wealthy employers and cosmopolitan merchants, was a very different society, marked not only by a dominant Dissent but also by a strong Roman Catholicism. Although Liverpool resembled Manchester in its wide class differences and its large number of Irish poor, it was a commercial rather than an industrial city. Moreover, unlike Manchester, it was an ancient incorporated borough and the activity of the town council in building churches in the eighteenth century during a period of great population growth (from about 10,000 in 1700 to 77,000 in 1801) appears to have been one factor in stemming the tide of Dissent, which was noticeably weaker in Liverpool than in the other three cities referred to above. In the nineteenth century the main religious issue at Liverpool was not Dissent versus the Establishment, but conflict between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Chartism, so powerful in other cities, appears to have taken second place to the sectarian conflict at Liverpool.

One of the most interesting of the various groups of Orthodox Christians that constituted the Rum Milleti within the Ottoman Empire were the Karamanli Christians of Asia Minor. These Karamanli Christians, or Karamanlides, were a substantial body of Christians Orthodox in religion but Turkish in speech. During the Ottoman period they were largely concentrated in the interior of Asia Minor, although they were also to be found in the Crimea and on the shores of the Sea of Azov. The question of their origin is a matter of controversy and is likely to remain so. Greek scholars incline to the view that the Karamanlides were of Greek descent and adopted Turkish as their vernacular, either by force or as a result of their isolation from the Greek speaking Orthodox Christians of the coastal regions. Turkish scholars regard them as the descendants of Turks who had migrated to Byzantine territories before the conquest or had served as mercenaries in the Byzantine armies and who had adopted the religion but not the language of their new rulers.

Liturgy, it has often been said, implies doctrine. Nowhere is this more patently clear than in the rubric before the second Exhortation ‘in case he [the Minister] shall see the people negligent to come to the Holy Communion’ in the Prayer Book of 1662. In view of the fact that ‘An Order for Holy Communion’ contained in the Report of the Liturgical Commission, April 1966, has departed from the valuable precedent of 1662, it may not be without contemporary value that we enquire into the origin, purpose and structure of this second Exhortation.