On one of his numerous journeys, Sidonius Apollinaris, by now bishop of Clermont Ferrand, turned aside to visit an old acquaintance, a former Palatine official, by name Maximus. He found him much changed: his villa, a rather remote one several miles from the main road, was sparsely furnished, with three-legged stools, hard couches and simple hangings of goat hair. His diet was frugal, more vegetables than meat; his dress was simple, and his beard long. Clearly, this was not the result of poverty (Sidonius' reason for visiting him was to plead for flexibility in the matter of a loan made ten years earlier to a mutual friend), but rather of deliberate choice. Sidonius himself had little doubt that there was a religious explanation, and so it proved: Maximus had been compelled by his fellow citizens, somewhat against his will, to accept ordination to the priesthood.

‘Between Creator and creature there can be remarked no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity between them cannot be seen’. With these words the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 concluded its condemnation of the doctrine of the Trinity held by Joachim of Fiore (d. 1202). The council based its assessment on Joachim's use of biblical texts as analogies for divine unity. For Joachim had, in the opinion of those who judged him, reduced the irreducible gap between God and His creatures by making God like His creatures. He had allegedly emphasised the principle of similarity at the expense of that of dissimilarity. The result was the dilution of the type of unity appropriate to the Trinity from a unity of essence to a mere unity of collection, no more binding than the spiritual unity among the faithful as expounded in many passages in the Bible, most importantly in John xvii. 22: ‘And the glory which thou has given me, I have given to them: that they may be one, as we also are one.’

The rigorous enforcement of religious discipline was a hallmark of Calvinist Churches in Reformation-era Europe. Wherever Calvinism took hold, ministers and elders went to extraordinary lengths to inculcate a Reformed morality among the members of local congregations. Since Calvinists identified the eucharistic community as the pure assembly of saints, it was necessary for Reformed consistories to defend the sanctity of the Lord's Table from all human corruption.

Queen Victoria had been crowned on 28 June 1838. When she died in January 1901 there can have been very few people indeed who had even the vaguest memory of what her coronation had been like. There was an opportunity for scholarship to influence the shape which the ceremonies for the new monarch would take and there was both a liturgical interest and a liturgical expertise which had not existed in the 1820s and 1830s.