It is still an open question whether Justin Martyr wrote two Apologies or only one, and whether the two Apologies which have come down to us under his name in no more than two manuscripts, one the Parisinus Regius 450, the other a Claromontanus, which is only a copy of the first, are composed of the fragments of the one (or two) which he wrote. The evidence is, indeed, at first sight rather bewildering. On the one hand we have the testimony of Eusebius, who refers in his Ecclesiastical History two Apologies, and gives ample quotations from a text very similar to that which has been preserved in the said manuscripts; on the other, not only does Eusebius himself maintain in one instance that the Second Apology was handed in to the emperors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, whereas he says elsewhere that it was addressed to the successor of Antoninus Pius, called Antoninus Verus (i.e. to Marcus Aurelius), but he also gives the first place to the Apology which in the Parisinus Regius 450 appears as the second and which in its first chapter shows that it was addressed to Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, and regards that which comes first in the Parisinus Regius 450 as the second. As to the internal evidence, there appears to be a break in both Apologies, in the First Apology after chapter lv and in the Second after chapter xii, after which the argument seems to trail off so that the respective remainders seem to be no more than collections of—sometimes very valuable—fragments.

In its Liturgy the Roman Church has always insisted on ‘Uniformity’, but even today there are a few local exceptions. One of the most interesting of these, the rite of the archdiocese of Braga, in the northwest of Portugal, has attracted very little external interest, but it has many points that repay study.

The surviving continuous records of the Court of Arches, or, to give it its full modern style, the ‘beloved Court of Canterbury of the Arches’, tell its history only from the Restoration. It had already been respected for centuries as the chief ecclesiastical court of the province of Canterbury and a large number of suits continued to come before it every year. The judge or Official Principal, commonly known as the Dean of the Arches from his lesser office as judge in the archbishop of Canterbury's peculiar of that name, was a person of considerable influence and importance. The proctors and advocates who conducted the cases were the more successful members of a flourishing profession. In the early eighteenth century, Thomas Oughton, the writer on ecclesiastical law, who was a proctor of the court, spoke of it with awe and veneration. ‘Let us reverently enter on one of the court days into the sanctuary of this august tribunal. … Behold! How solemn, how awakening the aspect of justice! … At first glance who is not penetrated with emotions of affection and veneration!’ But the court was shorn of most of its jurisdiction during the nineteenth century and it was described by Dickens in 1850 with very different feelings. The society of Doctors' Commons, the stronghold of the profession of the ecclesiastical law, was dissolved in accordance with the Court of Probate Act of 1857 and its buildings were pulled down.

Throughout its history one may detect three principle tendencies at work in the African Church. First, and probably the strongest, was the traditional Cyprianic and Donatist view of Christianity. This was a Biblical religion, rejecting the culture and society of the surrounding pagan world and exalting the qualities of the prophet and the martyr. Its ideas can be traced in unbroken sequence through the Montanists of Tertullian's time and the confessor party during the primacy of Cyprian down to the Donatists themselves. This religion interpreted the ideas of the majority of the North Africans at least as late as the first decades of the fifth century, and in particular it appealed to the labouring population of Numidia for whom it provided means of voicing hostility to the Roman taxes and Roman institutions.

Sixteenth century England saw a good deal of discontent with the education provided by the universities. Not only churchmen but also statesmen and schoolmasters felt the need for something more than the courses then provided. Cranmer first suggested (1540) the need for a nursery: ‘in every cathedral there should be provision made for readers of divinity, and of Greek and Hebrew; and a great number of students, to be exercised in the daily worship of God, and trained up in study and devotion’. Sir Humphrey Gilbert (1539?–83) outlined a scheme for Queene Elizabethes Achademy which was to educate her ‘Maiestes Wardes and others the youth of nobility and gentlemen’. The universities were unable at that time to do this work, Gilbert maintained, and special training was needed for those laymen who looked forward in due time to sharing in the government of their country. And for schoolmasters, Mulcaster made a like proposal (1580): ‘He that will not allow of this careful provision for such a seminary of masters, is most unworthy either to have a good master himself, or hereafter to have a good one for his. Why should not teachers be well provided for, to continue their whole life in the school, as divines, lawyers, physicians do in their several professions’. In 1556 cardinal Pole invented the word ‘seminary’ which has had such a powerful influence in educational history. It was adopted at the seventh session of the Council of Trent in 1563 when the Council devoted itself, with great success, to the provision of diocesan seminaries throughout the Roman Church. Thirtysix seminaries were founded by 1626.

The object of this paper is to draw attention to some of the English preachers and sermons of the thirteenth century. It is known that preaching gained new importance in this period, as a subject of study and as a means of evangelism, but we lack a comprehensive work on its development in England. The following pages are based on manuscripts in Oxford, Cambridge and London. In them I hope to indicate the contemporary attitude to preaching, to discuss some sermons whose authors can be identified, and to show something of the form and content of the sermons themselves.

None of the episcopal appointments in the reign of Edward III was more difficult for the king to secure than that of William of Wickham to the see of Winchester. Edward III was never keener for the promotion of a favourite clerk. The pope rarely agreed with more reluctance to a royal choice.

It was as a breath of fresh air that the first news of the debates at Salters' Hall came to a young minister in a remote country village in Somerset, where he had found asylum because he had deviated slightly from the received Calvinism of his day and been made to feel the oppressiveness of the orthodox atmosphere of Dissenting congregations in the neighbouring county of Devon. When the news came he had recently seen two of the four Exeter ministers, James Peirce and Joseph Hallett ejected by the Trustees from the city meeting houses as the result of what seemed to him a vendetta led by a certain John Ball, minister at Honiton. It is with evident exhilaration, therefore, that on the first news of the Salters' Hall debates he wrote to a friend:

‘Mr. [Ball]'s conduct with respect to Mr. Peirce and Mr. Hallet, will render him infamous throughout the kingdom. … Blessed be God, that he has stirred up such a noble spirit of Christian liberty in London: where it was carried in a meeting of above an hundred ministers, at Salters-Hall, that no human tests, articles, or interpretations should be urged as the trial of a man's orthodoxy; and that no minister should be condemned as heterodox, or an heretick, unless he taught, &c. contrary to express scripture. This was the substance of one part of their determination.’

Boniface VIII probably spent some half a million gold florins on the acquisition of lands for the Caetani. But of that money not a word is said in the Introitus and Exitus volumes, the main account books of the Apostolic Chamber. Where was it accounted for and from whence did it come? The pope had certain special sources of income which would not ordinarily be reckoned in the main account books, and of these, some could properly be termed his fortune as a private person, while others attached to his office as pope. There was the private fortune which he had before he assumed the tiara. There were the incomes of benefices personally reserved to him, gifts made him by prelates and laymen, legacies, sometimes the goods of deceased prelates, and the so-called ‘private visitations’ and ‘secret services’. Later in the fourteenth century many other sources were tapped for the benefit of a secret fund, and all in all the sums which it disposed of were formidable and sometimes enormous. The ends to which the money was directed were as various as the characters and policies of the pontiffs: it was used for nepotistic ends on a princely scale, as a mere convenient subsidiary to the main financial machine, as a war account, as a means of making enormous loans to lay rulers, or simply as a petty cash account. The earliest records of the secret accounts to survive are from the midfifteenth century, but the large sums involved, and its covert but great importance in papal policy in general make the earlier history of this institution as interesting as it is obscure.

One chapter of John Newton's life has been consistently overlooked by his biographers. It concerns his friendship with Thomas Haweis, the Evangelical whose importance students of eighteenth century English Church History are now beginning to realise. The influence of Whitefield, of Wesley, of Grimshaw upon Newton in his early and formative years has been amply recognised. The name of Haweis scarcely appears at all. Neither Richard Cecil, who continued Newton's own Authentic Narrative and also provided the prefatory memoir to his collected works, nor Josiah Bull, who in 1868 compiled what has remained the standard biography for more than three-quarters of a century, pay any real attention to Haweis. Nor does Bernard Martin's recent full-length portrait repair the omission. There are, it is true, several references to Haweis (though the index does not even succeed in spelling his name correctly), but no indications that the author is aware of the important rôle he played.

When the Wellington government translated Blomfield from Chester to London in 1828, he came to a diocese where pastoral superintendence had long ceased to bear any relation to the needs of the people. As early as 1811, 75,624 people lived in St. Marylebone, but the parish church had room for only 900 of them. Twenty years later, Baptist Noel computed that, owing to the deficiency of church accommodation, about one-third of the million and a half of the inhabitants of London were living ‘without any Christian instruction and without any public acknowledgement of God’. In 1834, in the north and north-east of London, there were only ten parishes for 353,460 people.

Rich. Baxters Apology Against the ModestExceptions of Mr T. Blake, and the Digression of Mr G. Kendall. Whereunto is added Animadversions on a late Dissertation of Ludiomaeus Colvinus, alias, Ludovicus Molinaeus, M. Dr. Oxon. and an Admonition of Mr W. Eyre of Salisbury, with Mr Crandon's Anatomy for satisfaction of Mr Caryl (London 1654) contains, besides the five main parts indicated in the title, a number of dedicatory epistles, prefaces and postscripts, some of them with and some without dates. In the following analysis of the work an attempt is made to elucidate its manifold occasion and the order in which the various pieces included in it were written, with the approximate dates of their composition.

The conflict between Louis XIV and the Papacy which centred round the régale and the decrees of the Assembly of the Clergy of 1682 has not lacked full treatment by church historians and its details are too well known to bear repetition. The Curia was not greatly concerned with the question of the régale; it was gravely affected by the decrees of the Assembly, which re-stated the historic Gallican view of the limitations on papal authority. By royal edict these decrees were to be taught in all colleges of every university and subscribed by all professors of theology. A crisis had arisen which had been feared by Rome as a possibility since 1516, especially since the last days of the Council of Trent, and the gravity of the situation was at once appreciated: the heresies of Basle and Constance had again raised their heads. The resulting deadlock lasted until the death of Innocent XI and by 1692 over forty episcopal sees in France were vacant. If the danger to papal authority was realised at Rome the effect of the crisis on Church order and discipline were appreciated in France. Both sides strove by all available means of diplomacy and propaganda to secure a victory.

If one considers the French production on early Church History, it is necessary to keep in mind two facts. First, the French State Universities have, with the exception of Strasbourg only, no Faculties of Theology; and there are only five Free Catholic Universities, controlled and sustained by the French episcopate, and three free Protestant Faculties of Theology. Some of these institutions are very small, as regards staff and numbers of students. This situation explains why publications on Church history represent a relatively small proportion of the French historical production as a whole. But, and this is the second fact to be noted, France, although it is largely dechristianised, still occupies a very important position—rin intellectual matters probably a leading one—within the Catholic world. This remark applies in particular to theological activities and publications, and more precisely to research and studies on Church history. There has been, among the more cultured elements of the French clergy, a sustained interest in this field of studies, ever since men like Duchesne and Batiffol introduced into the Catholic places of learning the principles and methods of modern historical research. It is largely due to their initiative and example that partiality is still shown for the study of early and ancient Church history. Accordingly, French publications on the matter are, with only few exceptions, of Catholic inspiration.