The prominence of religious issues in eighteenth-century British politics has received growing, and gratifying, recognition in recent years. In particular, attacks upon, and defences of, the doctrine of the Trinity have been seen as central to theological, and hence to political, debate. For many, the term ‘orthodoxy’ without qualification referred to one's position on this question. Although there is perhaps still insufficient emphasis upon trinitarian orthodoxy as a central feature of what is fashionably termed the state's self-image, Unitarianism is rightly perceived as important to critiques of the existing regime, especially after 1750. Historians of the Wilkites, of later eighteenth-century radicalism and of peace campaigns in the Napoleonic period, have cast Unitarians in at least a supporting, and sometimes a leading, role. Yet too often Unitarianism has appeared elusive and difficult to pin down, manyheaded and half-concealed under the vague label of ‘heterodoxy’.

The political situation in Ireland during the pontificate of Innocent III was highly complicated and, if we are to understand the relationship between the pope and the native Irish kings, it is necessary to make a short historical retrogression.

The Association for the Promotion of the Unity of Christendom (APUC), a joint Anglican/Roman Catholic association of prayer, was founded on 8 September 1857. Seven years later it was condemned by the Holy See for encouraging indifferentism by claiming that the Roman, Greek and Anglican Churches had an equal right to the title ‘Catholic’, the distinctive mark of a true Church. The papal rescript in which the condemnation was contained, Ad omnes Angliae episcopos, also offered a precise definition of the nature of the ‘Catholic Church’ which, in effect, excluded all possible schemes for reunion between the Churches except on the basis of unconditional submission to the Holy See.

Out of an approximate total of four hundred, the number of livings in Kent from which clergy are known to have been ejected under the Act for Confirming and Restoring of Ministers of 13 September 1660 and the Act for the Uniformity of Public Prayers of 19 May 1662 is sixty-five. For comparative purposes it may be observed that the number of Kentish benefices known to have been under sequestration during the period between 1643 and 1660 was one hundred and twenty, i.e. almost double. These figures follow fairly closely the pattern for England in general: the proportion of sequestrations (30 per cent.) is almost identical, the proportion of ejections a little lower in Kent (16 per cent.) than in the country as a whole. Since thirty-six parishes in Kent were affected by both sequestration and ejection, the number of parishes unaffected by either was even larger than is suggested at first sight by the figures given above. Dr. Whiteman's conclusion from her consideration of the statistics for sequestrations throughout the country would certainly seem to be true of the situation in Kent: ‘continuity was much greater … than used to be thought’.

Amongst those who have devoted their studies to the registers of archbishops and bishops, there has been a natural tendency to select for notice or publication those registers which will be most amply useful to scholars in the provision of historical evidence, and to set aside those volumes which are imperfect or in any way defective. The reasons for this are obviously cogent, yet complete neglect of the less satisfactory registers would be unfortunate. There is much to be learned even from the omissions and defects due to a decadent registry or a period of institutional confusion. In the hope, therefore, not only of indicating the nature of some of these less satisfactory registers, but also of showing in what directions they may include matters of interest, the registers chosen for notice in this paper are not those of Melton or Thoresby, not even that of Wolsey, which although late in date is a volume of great regularity, showing a well-conducted registry; the selected registers are those of Edward Lee (1531–44) and of his successor Robert Holgate (1544–53). They are volumes which cover the early part of the changes in ecclesiastical constitution in Tudor times, and may therefore be expected to show some reflexion, perhaps many reflexions, of the effects of those religious changes.

According to the Byzantine sources, the reign of the iconoclastic emperor Constantine v (741–775) was characterised by an attack on the very institution of monasticism, and the brunt of the persecution directed against the ‘orthodox’ was borne by the monastic order. This anti-monastic phase of iconoclasm has not passed unnoticed in modern attempts to clarify the origins and motive forces of the iconoclastic movement as a whole. The gamut of explanations ranges from an extreme position which maintains that die iconoclastic movement itself was merely a pretext for attacking parasitic monasteries and to confiscate their land holdings, through more balanced views which claim that the enthusiastic and determined propagation and defence of image-worship by monks was an obstacle which had to be removed by breaking the power of monasticism if the official iconoclastic policies were to be effective, to a recent more sophisticated approach which claims to recognise in both monasticism and icon-worship illegitimate, unlicensed forms of spirituality, signs of separatist tendencies which die State battling against Islam for survival could not afford to tolerate.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the local history of the English Reformation — that long, slow process of religious change which in many parts of the country did not really begin until after Elizabeth's accession and was still not complete at her death. The process was slow because of the paucity of parish clergy able and willing to preach the Word, catechise the young, upbraid the ungodly and so plant Protestantism firmly in the land. It took a long time to raise the intellectual and moral standards of the Church's personnel – to carry out a thorough ‘reformation of the ministry’.

The Confessions of Augustine carry his life down to the age of thirtythree, from his birth at Tagaste in Numidia in A.D. 354 to A.D. 387, when he was converted to Christianity by Ambrose in Milan. He wrote the Confessions ten years later, in A.D. 397–8, at the age of forty-three or forty-four, when he had just been made Bishop of Hippo Regius, the modern Bône, in North Africa. The work is an autobiography, the one exstant autobiography in Latin literature: but it is peculiar in being addressed primarily to the Deity and in being a record not of the writer's own achievements intended for his own glory, but of all the way by which the power of God had led him. So while in places it does narrate the events of his life and the development of his mind and thought, at other places it breaks out into rapturous praise and adoration of his Redeemer and becomes not so much a narration as a prose hymn, sometimes in a minor key of contrite repentance for the sins and faults of youth now pardoned, sometimes in an exalted strain of ecstatic love, worship, and devotion towards the One to whose service he is now wholly surrendered. Under the eye of the Omniscient, Augustine reviews his life from childhood till his conversion: it is a stern and unflinching self-examination: the pranks of his boyhood are tested for early evidences of sin with the same relentless analysis as the vices, the ambitions, and self-will of his youth and manhood. We have his school-days at his native Tagaste and at the neighbouring town of Madaura: we have the turbulence of his adolescence at Carthage: we see him as a student of rhetoric at Carthage and as a professor of rhetoric at Carthage, Rome and Milan: we are told how the beginnings of his spiritual awareness were excited by the reading of Cicero's Hortensius: we learn of his long association with the quasi-Christian sect of the Manichaeans, of his growing dissatisfaction with their doctrine of a material and finite Deity, and of his long perplexity about religious problems—until through the preaching of Ambrose at Milan and through a study of Neo-platonism, he comes to a realization of an immaterial, non-temporal, non-spatial One.