It has long been recognized that the homilies preserved in Old English from the early Middle Ages are almost entirely derived from Latin writings. It has also been known that, in selecting sources for adaptation, the Anglo-Saxon writers did not subject Latin materials to rigorous tests of orthodoxy and canonicity. Several important studies have been devoted to analysis of the relation of homilies which derive from apocryphal literature to their sources. They show that a relatively restricted number of apocryphal documents exercised an important influence on the popular religious literature of the late Old English period.

It is not surprising that the sixteenth century Anabaptist movement should gain increasing attention among American church historians. Anyone who becomes even slightly acquainted with that movement cannot help but observe that many of its features, such as its individualism, its rejection of infant baptism, its subjectivism, and its fragmentation into many diverse groups, seem to anticipate the kind of ecclesiastical developments that characterize much of North American church history. The parallel even extends to a number of individual phenomena: Many modern premillennialist movements hold views remarkably like those of Melchior Hoffman. The efforts of Jan de Bakker and Jan Beukelzoon to set up a Kingdom of God at Miinster were very like those of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and the Latter Day Saints who followed them, to achieve a similar objective in the United States. In this case the parallel even extends to the polygamy that was introduced in both movements. Among the early Anabaptists Adam Pastor held beliefs which did not differ markedly from the anti-trinitarian doctrines of the present Jehovah's Witnesses. The existence of many such similarities makes the study of early Anabaptism a profitable one to the student of American church history.

In 1643 the Long Parliament, confronted by war with the king and by religious anarchy, called an assembly of divines to advise it on the steps which must be taken to reform the church. The situation clearly called for decisive action. The bishops, shorn of their political power, had retired to live in their sees or to join the king. Many clergymen, suspected of royalist sympathies or unpopular because of their ritualistic tendencies, had been ejected from their parishes; others, like Thomas Fuller, non-ritualistic but royalist, had left to join the king; while other loyal Anglicans remained in their parishes with the support of their patrons or their church wardens and thus presented a threat to parliament. Furthermore, with the old discipline gone, sectaries had sprung up. To fill the vacant pulpits, to provide a form of ordination for those who objected to prelatical ordination, to substitute for the Prayer Book a simpler form of worship, and, most of all, to clip the wings of the bishops or to replace episcopal government with a system nearer to that of the reformed churches,— these were the tasks which confronted parliament. To accomplish them it went back to an action of 1642, when it had appointed a number of ministers of anti-Laudian, Presbyterian, or Independent views to act as advisors in the settlement which it hoped to reach with the king.

The mid-nineteenth century, which spawned numerous doctrinaire systems, witnessed the rise, among Baptists in Trans-Appalachia and the Southwest, of a doctrinaire ecciesiology which is consistent and rigid, and which calls for denominational exclusivism.

Episcopalian Bishop Charles Henry Brent was one of the outstanding pioneers in the modern ecumenical movement. His career as an international figure began in 1901 with an appointment at the age of 39 to be first missionary bishop of the Philippine Islands. From this mission vantage point his influence extended around the world. In 1909 President Taft chose him to be President of the First International Opium Commission in Shanghai. During the last year of the First World War he served as Senior Headquarters Chaplain to the American Expeditionary Forces. But Brent' greatest achievement was to be in the realm of church unity. He founded and inspired the Faith and Order movement, and presided over its First World Conference at Lausanne, Switzerland in 1927.

There is no man or movement in modern Irish history that can be intelligibly discussed apart from the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. That Church had for centuries been intimately bound up with nearly every phase of Irish life. Taking the measure of so complex and venerable an institution is an enormous task. Since there is no general history of the Church in Ireland, the main difficulty is in maintaining perspective. In confining the discussion to the narrower limits of the relations between the Irish Labour movement and the Church, an obvious distortion is attendent. Seeing the Church in microcosm is not seeing it whole and constant, if indeed such a thing is possible. Examining it with regard to Irish Labour is actually taking liberties with its historical context. Two unequal figures are in contention on the Irish stage, and the Church, which is certainly the larger of the two, suffers proportionately by having to play so limited a role.