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 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.

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.

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.

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.