It is my great privilege and pleasure to direct your attention to and to discuss with you in these lectures anew, hitherto completely unknown Christian text, probably dating from the second century, Gnostic in origin and contents, dealing with the great and important doctrine of the Resurrection.

It is always somewhat precarious to speak about a Gnostic book and to assess its importance. Experience shows that some people, attracted by the very fact that a completely unknown book has been discovered, are more or less disappointed when they make their first acquaintance with one of these ‘Gospels from the Nile-sand’. Now this is a fairly general reaction; places marked in travel-guides with three stars very seldom meet with general approval except for snobs. I for one must always suppress a feeling of disappointment on entering a site of archaeological excavation of which I read glowing descriptions. But in the case of these Gnostic writings there is more that can explain the feeling I have mentioned.

With the growth of houses in size and number, judicial activities and problems became more evident, and the general chapter consequently developed into a complex organ which was capable of dealing with the new demands. The records are not sufficient to show the smaller orders transacting judicial business and, indeed, their general chapters were probably less highly organised, but for the larger orders such as the Cistercians, and to a lesser extent the Premonstratensians, a jurisdiction can be seen at work. As records of the central government, the Cistercian Statuta are comparable with both the papal registers and with the papal law books or codes. They form the written law of the order, which was made in many instances like the Canon Law from questions and queries, and they record the operation of the judicial machinery, the activities of the judges and of the courts. Each Cistercian abbot had a copy of the year's Statuta. The records of the general chapter at Prémontré are apparently lost, but the letters of Gervase, abbot of Prémontré from 1209 to 1220, survive, and consequently they supply some information of an informal and unofficial kind about the conduct of lawsuits within that order. For the other orders, except the Dominicans whose acta survive from 1220 onwards, central records are either rare or non-existent.

The constitutional reorganisation which accompanied the original Cistercian reform was revolutionary and influenced all forms of religious vocation within the Church. The individual monastery was reinstated as complete and independent in itself, in opposition to the ‘centralisation monarchique’ of Cluny, but each monastery was also part of an order and was under the discipline of the order. The first genuine concept of a religious order had been introduced and many of its details were followed or forced upon all forms of black-monk monasticism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, at the time when the concept itself was being utilised by the Franciscans and the Dominicans. The reform had four general characteristics: the mother house was given pre-eminence within the order; an annual general chapter of all the abbots was established as the supreme legislative body; regular visitations of daughter houses by the abbot of the founding house were a means of supervision; and all of this was combined to form an administrative and disciplinary system capable of securing the fourth characteristic, the unity of observance throughout the order. This was the observance initially followed at Citeaux itself and represented a closer and even literal following of the Rule of St. Benedict, but it was to be secured by a constitutional organisation that drew no inspiration from the Rule. This organisation depended upon a two-fold supervision: horizontally, through the annual general chapter of the abbots of the order, and vertically, through the regular visitations of daughter houses by the abbot of the founding house, or his representative.

Cambridge University in the early 1570s, according to John Strype, ‘ran now much divided into two factions, whereof the younger sort, which were the majority, was much for innovations, and such were followers of Cartwright's principles; which the graver sort, especially the Heads, laboured to restrain’. It has been pointed out that the differences of age between ‘grave’ conformists and ‘rash’ non-conformists in the Cambridge of Cartwright and Whitgift were not so obvious and extreme as the authorities of the time liked to pretend. John Whitgift as master of Trinity and vice-chancellor was no more than thirty-eight; his opponent, Thomas Cartwright, was perhaps three years younger; and most of Cartwright's supporters were in their late twenties. Yet such seemingly small differences in seniority were not without significance in the hot-house of university politics and religious faction, especially when the ‘seniors’ were themselves such comparatively young men. Only four years before he set himself against the Cambridge Puritans as the very personification of authority and Anglican discipline, Whitgift, as fellow of Peterhouse and Lady Margaret professor of divinity, was openly sympathetic to the party of younger dons who were refusing to wear the surplices and square caps required by their own statutes and the ordinances of the Church.

The triumphal return of Charles II on 29 May 1660 was the prelude to a determination of the restored monarchy's structure rather than its aftermath. The many and vexed problems attendant upon Charles's reinstatement were still to be resolved, for the Declaration of Breda had wisely been confined to generalities. A parliament would be necessary to settle the terms of an indemnity, the ownership of the confiscated lands, the future of the army, and the character of the national Church.

The history of the English Vicars-Apostolic was traced some years ago by Dom Basil Hemphill, O.S.B. and also occupied much of an earlier book, first published in Rome in 1877, Annals of the Catholic Hierarchy by W. Maziere Brady. It may, however, be of interest to look more closely at a critical phase in the history of the most unfortunate of the vicariates, the Western, and to amplify the existing accounts from sources unexplored by these two writers.

Prior to 1813 the Honourable East India Company, in whose hands was vested the government of British India, exercised a monopoly over Britain's trade to that territory. As a result, persons not connected with the Company were legally required to obtain a licence from its Board of Directors in London. The passage by the British Parliament in 1813 of an Act to extend the Charter of the Company for a further twenty years wrought many changes: in addition to depriving the Company of its trade monopoly, the Charter contained a clause declaring it to be the duty of Britain to ‘promote the interest and happiness’ of the people of India by taking ‘such measures … as may tend to the introduction … of useful knowledge, and of religious and moral improvement’ —among other ways, by granting licences to missionaries so that they could assist in the work ‘of accomplishing those benevolent designs’.