Amidst the theological controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, the ritual kiss often played an important role in trying to distinguish orthodox from heretical Christians. For early Christian leaders such as Rufinus, Jerome, Augustine and Paulinus of Nola, the kiss became a means to malign an opponent while simultaneously reinforcing one's own claims to theological legitimacy. The kiss's connection to a wide range of symbolic systems made it a particularly versatile tool for early Christian polemics.

The momentous paradigm shift from God as Being to God as Person provides us with the context for gaining a firm grasp of Luther's own redefinition of the range and role of philosophy. By no means the life-long combatant, distorter or victim of scholasticism as later scholarship often claims, Luther at once unfolded and redirected a tradition that stretched back through St Bonaventura to St Francis of Assisi, a tradition that rejected the Thomistic ‘Unmoved Mover’ and envisaged a covenantal ‘God who acts’. For Luther, the ‘God who acts’ became the ‘God who acts in Christ’, who is unpredictable and foils any systematic search, who contrary to ‘reason’ carries the cross from Christmas to Easter.

William Robertson, Scottish historian, Presbyterian minister and leader of the Moderate church party, has been credited with a position regarding episcopacy that differed markedly from the sectarian suspicion shown by earlier Scottish Presbyterians. This article examines Robertson's attitude to episcopacy in the light of an early episode in his career, when he apparently had a chance to enter the Church of England (which offered greater rewards in terms of money and status than the Scottish Kirk), but did not take the opportunity. This examination, taking into account the views of episcopacy and the Church of England expressed in Robertson's histories and elsewhere, suggests that his personal position was in fact closer to the traditional hostility of older Scottish Presbyterianism than to the tolerant and even Latitudinarian views normally associated with the Enlightenment.

During a period of almost forty years, major Protestant denominations in Canada consolidated their scattered and individual Chinese mission activities into centralised institutions. However, the missions did not gain significant success in the mission field. Church leaders and missionaries often attributed this to a chronic lack of financial and human resources. But the real reason was the anti-Chinese sentiment that always cast a shadow over the missions. The rise of nationalism in the Chinese community at the turn of the twentieth century also had a negative effect on the mission.

The history of English Catholic theology between the break with Rome and the early years of the reign of Elizabeth I remains relatively little-known, despite (or perhaps because of) the publication of two recent American studies by P. S. O'Grady and E. A. Macek respectively: Henry VIII and the conforming Catholics, Collegeville, Minn. 1990, and The loyal opposition: Tudor traditionalist polemics, New York 1996. The appearance of a work which proposes to undertake a fresh survey of the whole period must therefore be welcomed.