In this paper I propose to give a description of the thought of John Cassian. There are two recent books on Cassian, one in English by Dr. Owen Chadwick and one in French, by Canon Christiani.I do not mean to go over the ground covered by these works but I have set myself the task of approaching the ideas of Cassian from a special point of view.

It has long been recognised that one of the most valuable documents about pluralism is the lengthy return of pluralists made in 1366 in accordance with a constitution of pope Urban V. In this return detailed information was sent in to archbishop Simon Langham by the various diocesans, containing the names of pluralists residing at the time in their dioceses, the value of their emoluments, their benefices and academic titles. It has an obvious value as a clergy-list, containing the names not only of several distinguished clerks who held office in the government service, but also of humbler men, as well as of that interesting class of university graduates to whom the acquisition of ecclesiastical benefices became a financial necessity.

I believe that the Henrician Reformation was a thoroughly revolutionary event, or set of events. It was revolutionary in a constitutional sense in declaring Henry head of the nation-church—as also in an ecclesiological one. It was revolutionary, ere long, in a further theological sense and, ere long again, revolutionary in its effect on property ownership and all that that implied. And, on top of this, it was a landmark in political and administrative history.

The latest monograph on the religious settlement of the Restoration calls attention to the untrustworthiness of Clarendon's account of the Act of Uniformity of 1662 while adopting the customary view, based on Clarendon's Life, that the Lord Chancellor ‘took a leading part in the Parliamentary attack upon the Indulgence’ in February 1663. With only one known exception, historians have relied heavily, and in most cases completely, on either Clarendon or T. H. Lister in ascribing to Clarendon a rôle of complete opposition to the Declaration of Indulgence of 1662 and the motives behind it, and the single exception, W. D. Christie, made only cautious references to some inaccuracies in the Life. Writers have erred in adopting Clarendon's narration of the Declaration and its background, and consequently have misinterpreted his basic policy and his interpretation of the English constitution. Careful study of new material and a re-examination of Clarendon's Life reveal that Clarendon consistently supported comprehension and toleration and that he was not responsible for the failure of the Declaration of Indulgence. It is even possible that the section of the Life so frequently cited in connexion with the Declaration does not even apply to that subject.

In 1851 an official census of religious worship was held in Great Britain for the first and last time. Alongside the ordinary decennial census, parliament sought information about attendance at public worship on a given Sunday, about the number of sittings available in churches and chapels, and about certain other matters. Because the result could be interpreted as showing that half the nation were Nonconformists, parliamentary defenders of the Establishment resisted any proposal to repeat a census of this sort. Every ten years from 1860 to 1910, they recommended instead a census of religious profession, by which the Church of England would certainly appear to be comparatively stronger. On these occasions nonconformist members of parliament invariably said that they would have a census of attendance or none at all. Consequently, since 1851 no official information about the religious preferences of the population has ever been collected. Its very uniqueness is one reason for coaxing out of the 1851 census of religious worship all the evidence it can yield. It is a richer quarry than its comparative neglect by social and ecclesiastical historians might suggest. The purpose of this article is to discuss how reliable it is as a source and what it reveals about religious practice in large English towns.

The Provincial Synod of the Church of the Province of South Africa met for the first time in 1870. A long controversy, of which the Colenso law-suits were the core, had made it plain that the Anglican Church was not, and could not be, an established Church in South Africa. The chief task of the synod was to provide some alternative machinery of government and a constitution which could legally serve as a contractual basis for the exercise of the Church's discipline. There were before the synod two documents of primary importance—the draft constitution which the South African bishops had been preparing since 1861, and the report of the first Lambeth Conference.

The first part of the Oath ‘ministered’ by the archbishop of Canterbury at the coronation of king George V in 1910, as at previous coronations, was the question:

‘Will you solemnly promise and swear to govern the People of this United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Dominions belonging thereto, according to the Statutes in Parliament agreed upon, and the respective Laws and Customs of the same ?’