In recent discussions about the Apostolic Ministry of the Church the Jewish factor in its development has proved a disturbing element. Therefore, a book dealing with the early rite of rabbinical ordination, which has been lately published in Germany, should be certain of an interested reception, even though the main facts can be found already in Billerbeck. Dr. Lohse, its author, shows himself well versed in rabbinical literature, and the evidence which he has collected is well-nigh complete. Unfortunately, the author's main thesis, although it is by no means new, is apt to provoke serious misgivings. For he claims (101) that ‘the Christian ordination was modelled on the pattern of that of Jewish scholars, although early Christianity filled it with a new content’. To support his claim the author has given only one important reason, namely that both rites had the imposition of hands as their centre. The other support which the author has tried to build up to strengthen his thesis is, to say the least, feeble. It is therefore necessary to enquire whether the laying-on-of-hands had the same intention in the early Christian ordination rite as in the rabbinical rite. Such identity of intention is, however, not even to be found in all the various cases of laying-on-of-hands in the New Testament, and the same is also true of contemporary Judaism.

In all the Ignatian epistles, except the Epistle to the Romans, we find polemical remarks and warnings against heretical tendencies which threatened the churches of Asia Minor.

It is not quite easy to obtain a clear picture of the heretics combatted by Ignatius. One point only is evident: their docetism. They considered Christ's life on earth, his birth, his human body, his death and resurrection as mere appearance.

In the last century the school of Tübingen held that Montanism is only a name invented by historians to describe certain currents of thought in the second century and later. But although the evidence for the movement is not so full as one might like, there is no more reason to doubt its historicity than most other contemporary movements or even persons. It is not easy to get rid of the later legal prescriptions of the Theodosian and Justinian Codes; while Aelius Publius Julius, bishop of Devultum in Thrace, expressed himself in no uncertain fashion: ‘As God in heaven liveth, I swear that the blessed Solus of Anchialus wished to cast out Priscilla's demon, and the hypocrites would not allow it.’ The Montanists were real enough to him.

In the medieval schools the Bible and the Fathers of the Church together constituted the fundamental argument in theological speculation. They were the two auctoritates, though different in order and degree, upon which the whole structure of the Sacra Doctrina was built. ‘The foundation stones of the edifice, of which the masters in theology are the architects’, as bishop Grosseteste in a famous letter addressed to the regent-masters in theology at Oxford put it, ‘are the books of the Old and the New Testaments’. The authoritative interpreters of Holy Writ are the Fathers of the Church. It was, therefore, imperative that the Masters in Sacra Pagina should be familiar with both the biblical and patristic teaching. That they were deeply versed in Holy Scripture cannot be doubted. Their writings bear witness to their thorough knowledge of the Sacred Books. The Bible was the text-book of the faculty of theology, the beginning and the end of the whole theological course. And since it was their main duty to expound the Scriptures, the masters in Divinity were rightly styled Magistri in Sacra Pagina, or in Sacra Scriptura.

L'anamnèse des liturgies eucharistiques pose deux problèmes: celui de son origine et celui de son développement. Le premier se rattache à la question plus générale de la structure de l'anaphore. Celle-ci, telle qu'elle nous apparaît dès la fin du IVe siècle, comporte six parties, abstraction faite des prières d'intercession qui représentent un développement secondaire. Ce sont: i. l'action de grâces; 2. le Sanctus; 3. le Post-Sanctus; 4. le récit de l'institution; 5. l'anamnèse; 6. l'épiclèse.

The organisation of the properties of a medieval secular cathedral like Lincoln differed radically from that of a monastic foundation like Canterbury or Durham. In the latter the endowments, though particular estates might be permanently assigned to one or other of the obedientiaries, were all used for the community as a whole. At Lincoln great estates and wealthy rectories were allotted to individual canons as their prebends so that accounts of these never came into those of the chapter except in vacancies of the prebends, which were rarely of long duration. The properties which were used for the additional payment of those of the canons who were in residence (their commons) and for the maintenance of the services and general administration were known as the Communa or Common Fund of the canons. It is from the records of this Common Fund that we learn much of the internal management of chapter affairs and of the relations of the chapter with external bodies.

Two generations of lawyers and historians of the early Church have worked over the scanty evidence bearing on the legal and political relations between the first Christian communities and the Roman Empire. It is not the intention of the present writer to add to the enormous volume of work on the subject. The results of their battles have been ably summarised by A. N. Sherwin-White, and with his conclusions the legal problem may be allowed to rest until new evidence is forthcoming. The object of this paper is to look at the question from another point of view, and to ask who were the sufferers, and in particular, who were martyred in the period before the first general persecution under Decius. Were Polycarp, Justin, Blandina and the rest chance victims of private denunciation and the fury of the mob, or did they represent a tradition of belief in which martyrdom became the climax of earthly life? And what of those who obeyed the precept to flee during persecution? Was their action due to cowardice, or was it the belief that martyrdom was not the will of God? Can we see in the controversy over martyrdom which engaged so much of Tertullian's energies, one more phase in the strife between the orthodox and gnostic concepts of Christianity, on the outcome of which so much in the future of the Church depended? What, in fact, was the relationship between the Gnostics and the Roman authorities?

The rural economy of late medieval Italy displays many features and obeys many tendencies common to western Europe at the time. In the age of fully developed communes and nascent despotism it is customary to emphasise that peasant unfreedom and dependent tenure had as good as disappeared, demesne farming and labour services were forgotten, and seigneurial rights diminished or suppressed; where these things have been discovered to persist they are noticed as curious survivals from a different society. Income from land consisted of rents, which on the older estates of church and nobility were commonly fixed rents in money or kind, paid in perpetuity or to an increasing extent for a term of years or at pleasure. New landlords however were displacing the old, men of the urban oligarchies and middle class, who were harsher than their feudal predecessors and pursued an active agriculture by way of grants in mezzadria (sharecropping), protected in their interest by municipal statute. Among ecclesiastical lordships many monasteries succumbed to debt or moral decay, and ecclesiastical property fell victim to a fresh wave of lay encroachment, proceeding from the towns. In Lombardy and the north all classes of society sought their advantage in taking church land at nugatory rents to sublet for high profits or even in time to possess outright. A new cupidity was in the air.

In the late twenties and the thirties of the nineteenth century, the failure of the Anglican Church to provide adequate pastoral superintendence became glaringly obvious. There were too few churches and clergymen in the new industrial and urban areas, and even in the rural districts poverty restricted the usefulness of many of the clergy. The Commission of Inquiry appointed by Grey in 1831 reported that the average annual income of each living was £278.

It had seemed that Ladeuze had firmly established the literary priority of the best Greek sources for the Life of Pachomius and his first successors as against the Coptic. Halkin's edition of the Vitae Graecae, while suggesting that the surviving ‘Vita Prima’ was not the earliest recension, had supported the same main conclusion—‘Cette première Vie de Pachôme fût certainement rédigé en grec. La discussion est présentement close.’

Strictly speaking, there is only one festival of encaenia in the ancient Church reported by our ancient or modern authorities on the subject, the feast of the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, instituted on 13 September 335 to mark the tricennalia of the emperor Constantine, and described for us by Eusebius in his Life of Constantine. The rebuilding of churches after the persecution under Diocletian, and a similar encaenia of the Church of Tyre are even more fully recorded in the tenth Book of the History. Both dedications were accompanied by a long panegyric of the emperor, delivered by Eusebius himself, extolling Constantine as a second Solomon, and were the occasion for similar festive addresses and theological discourses from other visiting ecclesiastical dignitaries: but, apart from the magnificence of the occasion, the public banquets, the vast concourse of delegates from every part of the Christian world (Eusebius seems to be as anxious as Luke in his account of Pentecost in Acts ii. to emphasise the ecumenical character of the occasion), there is nothing unexpected in any of the rites or ceremonies performed at the encaenia; in addition to the celebration of the Eucharist, they consisted for the most part of prayers for the general peace, for the Church of God and for the emperor, Scripture readings, singing of psalms, and the lavish distribution of alms.

One of the principal arguments against the authenticity of the Constantinian documents, and of the Life in which they are incorporated, has been the phrase used by Constantine in one of them to describe his age at the opening of the Great Persecution in a.d. 303—ττε κομιδ παῖς ἔτι ὑπρχων. According to data provided by the author of the Life—and by other sources—Constantine was about 63 when he died in 337, and would therefore have been about 29 when the Persecution opened. A man of 29 could not possibly be described as a παῖς, and the phrase was, therefore, it was argued, evidence that the document in which it occurred was a forgery. As there is now strong presumptive evidence that the document is in fact genuine, it may be worth while to reconsider the passage.

Marginalia in medieval theological manuscripts are rarely worth investigating further but Merton College, Oxford MS. L. i. 14 (Coxe 132), ‘Peter of Poitiers on the Sentences’ followed by Simon of Tournai's Summa in sacram paginam has several most important drafts of letters. The manuscript which was written early in the thirteenth century has at fos. 109r, 110r and 113r in a cursive hand of the second half of the second quarter of the thirteenth century entries almost certainly made by William of Thetford, an early prior of the Oxford house of the Friars Preachers.

‘D'une manière générate, on peut dire que les littératures chrétiennes de l'Orient sont largement tributaires de la littérature grecque.’ This statement of the late Paul Peeters concerning oriental hagiographical literature may equally well be applied to that of the Slavs. At the same time it does not in any way detract from the merits of original Slavonic hagiography to admit its debt to the Byzantine influences which it preserved and enriched. The principal channels by which these influences were transmitted were Slavonic translations of Greek works, mainly ecclesiastical, which were made from the late ninth century onwards. Among these translated works, which formed the nucleus of early Slavonic literature, were the most important Byzantine hagiographical compilations and ascetical treatises produced between the fifth and seventh centuries: the Apophthegmata Patrum; the Ἀνδρν γων ββλος (=The Book of Holy Men); the Lausiac History of Palladius; the Historia Monachorum; the Historia Religiosa of Theodoret of Cyrus; the Pratum Spirituale of John Moschus; and the Scala Paradisi of St. John Climacus. There is also evidence that the Paraenesis of Ephrem the Syrian was translated, and at least one treatise by, or attributed to, Evagrius, as well as the Latin Dialogues of Gregory the Great, this last from its Greek version.

So little is known of William Laud's life at Oxford that the following letters assume some importance. They were written during his term as President of St. John's College and have recently come to light amongst the Court papers of the Worshipful Company of Carpenters. Laud here pleads on behalf of a poor student, and the pleader's rôle seems surprisingly to become him.