Discussion of the errors combatted by Ignatius of Antioch of centred on the question of whether they were one or two in number. While some scholars have discovered opposition to a single, composite Judaeo-Christian-Docetic error, others have argued that Ignatius opposed two groups, viz. Docetists and Judaisers. Here I intend to discuss a third error which appears to be connected with the continuing tension, observable in other writings of the time, between the priestly and prophetic ministries.

Ordination registers have been unduly neglected by historians, and the bibliography ofworks dealing with them is scant. Nevertheless, they are our most valuable source for documenting the recruitment of clergy, both secular and regular, while they also provide indirect evidence for demographic, religious and educational trends. The data assembled in the graphs and tables below, extracted from the archiepiscopal archives of York, detail the total surviving ordination records from England's largest diocese during the period from just before the first outbreak of bubonic plague to the beginning of the Reformation.

Bernd Moeller concludes in his often-quoted study of late medieval German piety that ‘one could dare to call the late fifteenth century in Germany one of the most churchly-minded and devout periods of the Middle Ages’. In his review of Moeller's work, W. D.J. Cargill Thompson points out that the ‘profound conservatism’ of this religiosity, which included devotion to the mass, veneration of saints and their relics, and the reading of vast amounts of religious literature, poses a problem for our understanding of the causes of the Reformation. How does one reconcile this traditional churchliness with the ‘remarkable suddenness’ of its collapse after 1520? One would have expected greater resistance to Lutheran ideas than actually occurred.

The Restoration was a victory for the governing classes, a victory for social stability and discipline. Dissent, the gentry argued, led to republicanism and social disintegration: Anglicanism and the monarchy meant order. Yet despite the ease with which Charles it returned in 1660 and the relative lack of bloodshed which accompanied his restoration, it was by no means certain that the settlement would be anything more than transitory. God, in his infinite and impenetrable

When the Westminster Assembly convened in 1643, English puritans were confident that their effort to reform the government and liturgy of the Church of England would at last be completed. Their expectations were not fulfilled. In the early sessions of the Assembly the ‘dissenting brethren’, a group of clerical Independents led by Thomas Goodwin, opposed the establishment of a national Church on a Presbyterian model. The Independents claimed to be as orthodox as the other members of the Assembly in matters of doctrine, but they could find in scripture no ground for synods exercising the authority of excommunication. So deep was the dissension they created that, in spite of all Presbyterian attempts at reconciliation, spiritual harmony was not restored to the puritan crusade.