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.

There have been of late two important books dealing with Theodosius and the Christian Church—one by W. Ensslin and the other by N. Q. King. To a large extent these two authors are agreed that the emperor from the time when he was called by Gratian, the senior Augustus, after the catastrophic defeat of Valens at Hadrianople in 378, where the Roman army of the Balkans together with its emperor was annihilated, gave most of his time and mind to the re-establishment of the Catholic Church in the East. King (op. cit., 18) makes the point that upon a man like Theodosius, brought up as a devout Western Catholic, the enormous change of fortune which took him from voluntary exile to the imperial throne, must have left a profound religious impression: Deposuit potentes de sede et exaltavit humiles.

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.

Within the papacy's jurisdiction of Western Christendom, the general chapter of each religious order replaced the Curia Romana, as the central legislative and judicial assembly. The text of the Promulgatio Chartae Charitatis elaborates this right of self-government and compares the hierarchy of the Cistercian order with that of the Roman Church:

‘… sicut Christus Ecclesiam suam condidit sub Romano Pontifice, per quatuor Patriarchas, Archiepiscopos multos, sed plures ad hue Episcopos regendam; sic Cisterciensis ordo sub abbate Cistercii supremo capite, pro Episcopis abbates filios habeat, pro Archiepiscopis abbates quos patres vocant, pro Patriarchis primos illos quatuor, per quos in charitate radicatus, ac mutuis inter se officiis devinctus, sine alius interventu regeretur …’.

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 search for royal councillors was one of the major difficulties which Henry V had to face once he had achieved the conquest of Normandy. Many local royal officials, having taken the oath of loyalty to the king, were confirmed in their posts; others were brought over from England—a system which proved satisfactory at first. But the finding of personnel for the higher offices presented Henry with a serious problem. Since he was unwilling to trust the native French at so early a stage he could, and did, begin by seeking the counsel of his fellow-countrymen. But this method could not continue indefinitely, since it did not correspond with the intentions lying behind the conquest, planned to be lasting and permanent. However, the alliance with Charles VI, cemented in 1420 by the Treaty of Troyes, meant that the English could now call upon a number of Frenchmen, many of Burgundian origin or sympathy, to serve in the royal council. It was soon realised, too, that the university of Paris was an admirable seed-ground for future royal councillors, especially lawyers, of whom there was need. By the end of Henry V's reign, a number of these graduates were already employed by the English: under the regency of the duke of Bedford they soon achieved a numerical superiority in the royal council in France. From now on, the English dominions were to be ruled by men of these two groups.

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.

In his Introduction to The Visitations in the Diocese of Lincoln 1517–1531, the late Professor Hamilton Thompson drew attention to the large number of pluralist and non-resident parish priests in the diocese in the early part of the sixteenth century. He could do no more than comment on a few cases, since the scribe did not bother to include in the comperta the names of all delinquents, their alleged reasons for non-residence nor the details about their licences. More recently attention has been drawn to the actual number of non-residents, but no attempt has been made to go behind the figures to the individual priests and parishes concerned.

The changing situation of the Church of England in the first half of the nineteenth century raised numerous questions, not least of which was the proper place of the laity in Church government. The repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts followed closely by the Roman Catholic Emancipation Bill were tacit admissions that no longer could Hooker's ideal of a co-terminous Church and State be regarded as a reality. But, whilst the majority within the Established Church was quite ready to acknowledge the justice of the 1828–9 parliamentary measures, they were not quite so ready to deal with the legal anomalies of Royal Supremacy over a Church of which not all the queen's subjects were members. If the question was asked before 1829, ‘Where are the laity of the Church represented in deliberations on its temporal welfare?’ it was theoretically possible to answer ‘in parliament, and in particular in the House of Commons’. After 1829 it was no longer possible to maintain this position, even from a theoretical point of view. The renewed and vigorous campaigns for the revival of Convocation which followed in the next thirty years sprang both from a recognition that no longer could parliament be regarded in any sense as a representative voice of the Church of England, and the recognition of the necessity to have a proper and representative expression of opinion on matters relating to the temporalities and spiritualities of the Church.

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 Parish Mission in England begins with a petition addressed to pope Gregory XVI by Monsignor Wiseman at the end of January 1840.

In this document, Mgr. Wiseman expressed his belief that the situation in England gave well-founded hopes for the rapid propagation of the Roman Catholic faith, so long as favourable circumstances were seconded by energetic measures. He said that his own journeys throughout England, the opinion of the Vicars Apostolic, of the clergy and of the people, had confirmed him in his conviction that an Institute of missionary priests would be most efficacious, even necessary, if this rapid growth of Catholicism was to become a reality.

Eriugena made a name for himself both by his outstanding scholarship and by the boldness, not to say the heterodoxy, of his opinions. As a natural consequence of this, there has been since the Middle Ages a tendency to attribute to him works displaying these characteristics for which no more likely author could be found. My ‘Bibliography’ of Eriugena was an attempt to give an account of his genuine writings purged of these accretions, and I made no reference to them in it. As, however, many of them have been published under his name in Migne's Patrologia and elsewhere, and as the literature in which their genuineness is questioned or refuted is not always easily accessible, it seemed that a supplement to the ‘Bibliography’ containing a list of the works that were excluded from it with, where possible, the reasons for their exclusion might be useful. This supplement breaks no new ground: particularly, my debt to Dom Maïeul Cappuyns is greater than in the ‘Bibliography’ for, whereas more Eriugena material has come to light since he wrote, I know of no work excluded by him from the Eriugena corpus which has since been proved to be genuine. Such value as this note has is that of convenience.

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’.