This paper attempts to explore a number of inter-related ideas—inter-related in so far as they are all concerned in one way or another with evil, and God's relationship with it. The belief most characteristic of Christianity is the assurance that redemption from evil has been achieved for mankind in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our first enquiry is concerned with a basic contradiction in the accounts of this belief given in Greek Patristic literature. Secondly, attention will be drawn to the tension between this characteristically Christian affirmation and the efforts of Christian thinkers of the period to produce a rationally-based theodicy—that is, their treatment of the problem of evil as traditionally understood. The conclusion raises the question whether our findings require us to charge the Greek Fathers with incoherence in their theology.

Was Cuthbert Tunstal a ‘trimmer’—that is, one primarily concerned with his own advantage—rather than a partisan in the religious revolution initiated by Henry VIII? We might have expected the latter contingency after reading the glowing tribute paid to him by Sir Thomas More: ‘… the incomparable Cuthbert Tunstal, who, to everyone's satisfaction, has recently been appointed Master of the Rolls. I will not try to praise him, not simply because the world would discount such praise from a close friend, but because his fine qualities and learning defy description. His fame is so widespread, that praising him would be, as they say, like lighting up the sun with a candle’. Yet the historiographical neglect of Tunstal seems to indicate that historians have preferred the pejorative judgement of Foxe, who says that he ‘dissembled’ in taking the Oath of Supremacy to Henry VIII. All the conservative bishops who took the oath ‘turned cat-in-the-pan’ in Mary's reign, but when they took it in 1535 they were, according to Foxe, ‘right Lutherans’. He, unquestionably, thought Tunstal was a ‘trimmer’.

Under the leadership of James the Lord's brother the Christian Church at Jerusalem was probably the most influential of all existing Christian communities. It could boast a system of internal organisation under authoritative resident leaders; it was an important missionary centre, despatching apostles and recalling them, or sending advisors to them when they were in difficulties. Neither the prestige nor the destiny of the Jerusalem Church were the immediate concern of the author of the Acts of the Apostles, and it is Hegesippus who keeps us informed of its progress. The stability of that Church was apparently shattered shortly after the death of James, when the Jews revolted against the Romans and ‘immediately Vespasian attacked them’. We hear no more about the Jerusalem Church directly from Hegesippus until he tells of a meeting convened to elect a successor to James, and Eusebius tells us that this meeting took place after Jerusalem had been taken in A.D. 70.

Despite the great attention which the puritan movement has received, many historians have been reluctant to afford religion a major role as an immediate precipitant of the English civil war. There has been a tendency to settle the matter by quoting Oliver Cromwell's statement: ‘Religion was not the thing at first contested for …’, although he put forth this interpretation more than a decade after the event. Recently attention has been focused upon the early 1640s as a period in which puritans became highly militant; at the same time, the key to this aggressiveness has been provided by a series of studies of the hitherto neglected apocalyptic ideas of English protestants. Dr. Burrell has shown a close relationship between apocalyptic thought and the outbreak of the Scottish rebellion, while other scholars have indicated that such a connexion existed at the start of the English civil war. This article will attempt to chart the development of puritan militance by examining the apocalyptic interpretations put forward by prominent English reformers during the crucial period which began with the opening of the Long Parliament on 3 November 1640 and ended with the first great battle of the civil war at Edgehill on 23 October 1642. The importance of religion in the outbreak of that conflict should thereby be demonstrated.

Fourteenth-century records give a depressing picture of the finances of the Cistercian Order. In 1338, for instance, the Chapter General stated that the Order was heavily in debt at the papal curia and in the fairs of Champagne, and that its income was not sufficient to meet all its obligations. Its immunity from papal and royal taxation had been largely eroded in the thirteenth century. During the Avignon period the popes levied frequent property taxes from the Church in France, and by an arrangement with the French monarchy, the lion's share of the profits went to the king. In this way Philip VI obtained money from the Church during the Hundred Years’ War. The premier abbeys of the Cistercian Order, and its other houses within the kingdom, were not exempt from these exactions, and no doubt shared the distress of the French clergy. In 1362 Urban V refused to levy another property tax from the Church in France, on the grounds that it had paid more than enough.

Historians in recent years have shown considerable interest in the alienation from conventional church-going revealed by the Religious Census of 1851, as well as in the efforts of the churches to reach the masses in the second half of the nineteenth century. Less attention has been paid to special means of evangelism before 1850, the impression perhaps being given that despite awareness of the problem of the unchurched, the response to this was narrow and conventional—a matter simply of increasing and rationalising the traditional provision of churches, clergy and parish organisation or their Dissenting equivalents. It is true that Sunday Schools have been noted as devices for capturing and controlling the young; but little attention has been paid to what was probably the most characteristic device during the second quarter of the century for extending religious influences to adults outside the Church— the domestic visitation society. The purpose of the present paper is to attempt a limited inquiry into the circumstances in which these societies began; the different models they followed; and the purposes they pursued.

The appearance of the contemporary archbishop of Canterbury in the crises and conflicts of later medieval England has never surprised historians. For not only by tradition but in terms of real political weight the archbishop, unlike his brother of York, had a part to play in the affairs of the realm which he could scarcely hope to avoid, no matter how invidious. Appointed almost invariably with the close and usually decisive interest of the Crown in mind, the archbishop could anticipate repeated calls from the Crown for his support, counsel and service. However, thoughtful contemporaries and broadminded historians alike have for the most part been at pains to put this particular aspect into the wider context of the archiepiscopal function as a whole; the approaching cloud of the Reformation has not deceived historians into underestimating the considerable stature and merits of the metropolitans of this period. Whatever unsatisfactory reasons of state, ambition or faction lay behind their promotion, almost to a man they performed their arduous duties, with their diverse and often contradictory obligations, with good intent, frequent self-sacrifice and more often than not considerable success, at least in the eyes of the orthodox churchmen of their own time. If their political appearances alone have entered the textbooks, closer observers have been aware that the care of the Church was their first concern, and political involvement a distraction and a burden. At times the service of two masters posed its dilemmas, but usually the Crown preserved the archiepiscopal position by a fundamental respect for its other loyalties to God, the pope and the Church, and did not call for an irrevocable commitment fracturing these obligations.

Historians of ancien régime France frequently pay tribute to the statebuilding capacities of that most talented and successful architect of absolute monarchy, Louis XIV. And it has long been recognised that, of the many institutions either created or inherited by the French Crown which were wont to claim a share in the handling of the daily affairs of the realm, the Council of State became, during the personal rule of Louis XIV, the chief vehicle for dispensing the royal will. Unfortunately, the sheer volume of matters dealt with by the Council has tended to discourage historians from making it the object of intensive study. More important is the fact that the machinery of Council after 1661 reflected two apparently contradictory tendencies: the peculiar personal and informal nature of Louis XIV's government, and the incipient formalism and bureaucratisation which were to become dominant factors in the government of late eighteenth-century France. The consequent flexibility and complexity of the system have certainly been important characteristics which have so far precluded a full and detailed explanation of the forms and functions of the Council and, more generally, its overall significance in the administration of absolute government.

As 1829 began an unrequited Ireland remained on the apparent verge of rebellion while parliament, having removed another obstacle to Roman Catholic Emancipation in its revocation of the sacramental clauses of the Test and Corporation Acts (9 Geo. IV, c. 17), faced a nation seemingly unready for papist equality. The memory of the Gordon Riots of 1780 remained, for some as fresh as if they had occurred only the day before. Twelve members of the General Body of Protestant Dissenting Ministers issued a call on 13 January for a special meeting to be held seven days later, to consider if the Independents, Presbyterians and Baptists of the metropolis should add the weight of their opinion to that already mustered in support of the removal of the Roman Catholics' civil disabilities.

Between the accession of queen Victoria and her death sixty-three years later the Wesleyan Methodist Church increased its membership from 292,000 to 454,000 persons. Recently, however, Dr. Currie has put this seemingly impressive growth in better perspective by indicating that in no censal decade after 1841 did the Connexion keep pace with the increase of population. In this paper that increase will be examined under two categories. First, those sudden spurts of growth which the Church then and later, related to that intensification of devotional practice and religious fervour which it called ‘revivals’; secondly, the regular work and growth of the Church in the years when there were no remarkable increases of members. The third and concluding section will consider the interplay of these factors and the character of Wesleyanism at the end of the century.

One of the consequences of the Reformation in England (as elsewhere) was that for Protestants, at least, the image of sainthood changed considerably. Erasmus's Colloquies had poked fun at the kind of saint honoured by the Golden Legend; and Thomas Cromwell drove the point home in his Injunctions of 1536 and 1538. ‘New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth …’ and a new cause naturally creates its new heroes. The changing conception of sainthood in sixteenth-century England, culminating in Foxe's Actes and Monuments, has attracted not a little modern scholarly attention, as for example in Helen C. White's Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs. But one pivotal figure in this development deserves more intensive study: John Bale (1495–1563), the famous antiquary, dramatist and protestant propagandist. In the 1540s Bale published works on two protestant ‘saints’—Sir John Oldcastle and Mistress Anne Askew—which did much to imprint the new definition of sainthood on the English mind. For these little tracts alone (and particularly in the light of Bale's later relationship with John Foxe) Bale's contribution to protestant hagiography invites a closer look.

Modern scholarship on John Knox has tended to ignore his development of the covenant concept and his place in the covenant tradition. This is especially surprising because of the significance of the covenant idea for seventeenth-century Scottish history. The covenant, moreover, became a basic theme of English and American Puritan thought in the century following Knox's death. During the early years of the formulation of the covenant concept in English Puritanism, Knox was a revered figure. Following his various preaching activities in Edwardian England and his association with English exiles on the Continent during Mary's reign, he continued to maintain his interest in and contact with English Protestants, even while playing a major role in the establishment of the Reformed faith in Scotland. In 1568–9, for example, he was called upon to give advice respecting the question of separation from the Church of England. It is, thus, quite possible that his views on the covenant influenced English Puritan thought, as well as the thought of the Scottish Protestants. A study of Knox's views on the covenant is also important because of the place of the covenant in the development of his position on the legitimacy of active rebellion against tyrannical, idolatrous sovereigns. Finally, an examination of Knox's covenant thought is significant because it reveals that he was not as dependent on John Calvin as has been commonly supposed.

The peculiar difficulty of contemporary or near contemporary history is less the privacy of archives than the excess. This is the more true concerning an age like that of Hitler, where the accidents of war, and the seizure of documents, followed by a consuming public interest, especially in Germany, have led some governments to open their archives before they would otherwise have considered it wise. The great collection of State (and other) papers in the Bundesarchiv at Coblenz already affords material for many enquirers for many years. The material for the Church struggle as it lies in archives was surveyed by John Conway, with a delightful description of the extraordinary confusion, and movement of papers hither-and-thither, caused by war and its aftermath. For obvious reasons the West managed to collect the most important papers. But no one should overlook the circumstances that documents and archives lie still inaccessible, or largely inaccessible, in the East. This is not peculiar to the documents of the age of Hitler, for students of the nineteenth century cannot yet gain access to the substantial Russian collections, even when these students hold chairs in the German Democratic Republic or in Poland and even when they work upon some ‘harmless’ and remote theme. The Polish archives are more available but are only beginning to be sorted and published. The Russian academy has much to do before it can make its resources more widely available.

The Presbyterian congregation which used to meet in Tothill Street, Westminster, during the later Stuart period is now chiefly remembered for its succession of distinguished pastors. There were three of them, each a figure of importance in the dissenting community of London: first Thomas Cawton, a Bartholomean, under whose direction the congregation was formed and held together in the precarious years following the enactment of religious Uniformity; then Vincent Alsop, an accomplished controversialist who took issue with the doctors of the Church of England, and who, for a quarter of a century, faithfully tended his flock in good times and bad; finally there was Dr. Edmund Calamy, the learned historian of Caroline nonconformity, one of a new generation of Presbyterian divines, during whose early ministry the meeting removed from Tothill Street to other and more spacious premises in the nearby Princes Street. Our present purpose is to take a closer look at one of these ministers, the middle one—Vincent Alsop, ‘a man of great worth and piety’, who superintended his Westminster congregation from 1677 to 1703, the year of his death. His ministry, as we shall show, was to make an important contribution to the emancipation of Old Dissent, especially in the 1680s.

Among the papers of Patrick Young preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford is a copy of a translation into Greek of a licence granted by Elizabeth I in 1597 for the collection of alms towards the ransom of the sons of the murdered metropolitan of Thessaloniki.

The document is remarkable for several reasons: it is an early example of English sympathy for Greeks suffering under Turkish oppression: it includes the only account, so far as one can tell, of the execution of the metropolitan, and it is also of interest as an example of an Elizabethan licence to collect alms for charitable purposes.