There are four major interpretative themes in historical writing about nineteenth century English politics whose exposition has customarily involved a bald allusion to Gladstone's abolition of compulsory church rates in 1868. In reality the facts do not justify any of these familiar uses. What follows is intended not only to demonstrate that this is so by briefly describing ‘how it really happened’, but also to consider how it has come about that this legislation has been so often pressed into service in inappropriate contexts ever since it was passed, and to speculate a little upon this as part of the general problem of the delays and paradoxes in the development of historical writing on nineteenth-century England.

The Appendices to the Report of the Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts, published in the great reforming era of the eighteen-thirties, provide rich fields for the exploration of fossil-hunters. There, enrolled and briefly described, are the Church courts of the country. Their practice had, by that time, shrunk considerably; but few, or none, of the old courts had disappeared entirely.

This paper is focused on Elizabeth's Reformation in the Irish Pale around Dublin, the key religious battleground in Tudor Ireland. It highlights the strength of opposition to Elizabeth's religious settlement from the start of her reign. It shows in stark terms that Ireland experienced a Reformation virtually without reformers, and suggests that that was a major reason for its failure. The contrasting experiences of England and the Pale suggest, in turn, that revisionist historians have underestimated the progress of Protestantism in England before Elizabeth's reign.

Abraham's encounter at Mamre (Genesis xviii.1–16) captivated the Christian imagination from the tradition's very origins. The story hints at God's self-disclosure in a triad of visitors – a theophany that evoked the presence of the Logos or even the Trinity. This article examines late antique exegetical trajectories, focusing upon the interaction between text and expositor in light of the latter's socio-historical context. For patristic exegetes, the Mamre account contained profound spiritual truth if read through the correct doctrinal lens, while presenting a foothold for heresy to the unwary. Changing visions of Trinitarian orthodoxy thus gave rise to new strategies of reading.

There are a number of excellent studies on the Protestant Churches in the Third Reich, but none contains a thorough treatment of the smaller Free Churches. Ernst Christian Helmreich included a short chapter on these in his 1979 work on The German Churches under Hitler: background, struggle and epilogue. The recent publication of a work by Andrea Strübind on the German Baptist Churches, Die unfreie Freikirche: der Bund der Baptistengemeinden im Dritten Reich (1995), and by Herbert Strahm on the Episcopal Methodist Church, Die Bischöfliche Methodistenkirche im Dritten Reich (1989), should encourage research on a topic that has been badly neglected in the past.

This article seeks to shed light on the relationship of German evangelicalism as embodied in the Free Churches to the mainline provincial churches as well as to the regime of National Socialism. It will show that evangelicals were actually far less united than is generally perceived to be the case.

This paper examines Joseph Edkins's failed attempt to correct the theology of Hong Xiuquan during his trip to Nanjing in March and April 1861. Through his debates with individual rebels and his written exchange with Hong, Edkins learned that the Taipings were unwilling to accept ‘orthodox’ teachings and scriptural interpretations that conflicted with their established belief system. Challenging exclusionary and pathologising discourses, the paper shows that Hong's response to Edkins's efforts was rooted not in his ‘irrational’ modes of thinking, but in his desire to preserve both his revelation-based worldview and the personal authority that it legitimised.

This essay examines the political and religious impetus behind Patriarch Meletios Metaxakis's recognition of Anglican orders in 1922. The furore surrounding recognition, the events that led up to it and the fall-out that followed shed light on the many difficulties faced by religious leaders in the post-war Orthodox world, difficulties that led to fierce jockeying among Orthodox clerics as they tried to establish themselves in relation to their coreligionists and to the larger Christian world. The controversy also offers insight into the problems inherent when a ‘comprehensive’ Church such as the Church of England enters into discussions with a more uniformly dogmatic confession such as Orthodoxy.

Few biblical episodes have generated more theological interpretation across the centuries than that of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he appears fearfully to resist the divine will in the moments before the passion sequence is initiated. Scholars of the early modern period, however, have tended not to notice how central the scene became in the wake of Protestant and Catholic reformation developments, renewed calls for spiritual self-examination and the resurgent phenomenon of martyrdom. This article addresses this lacuna by arguing that, in the case of England, Jesus in Gethsemane not only held acute resonances across different confessions, but resulted in interpretations that perpetuated a new kind of subjectivity, and one that influenced modernity and its notions of the divided self in a state of faith and doubt.

This article examines a previously unnoticed link between the Puritan John Burgess and the Calvinist conformist George Hakewill. In 1604 Burgess preached a court sermon so outspoken and critical of James i's religious policy that he was imprisoned. Nearly twenty years later, however, Hakewill chose to incorporate extended passages from Burgess's sermon into the series of sermons, King David's vow (1621), preached to Prince Charles's household. This article considers why Burgess's sermon became so resonant for Hakewill in the early 1620s and also demonstrates how Hakewill deliberately sought to moderate Burgess's strident polemic. In so doing the article provides important new evidence for the politically attuned sermon culture at Prince Charles's court in the early 1620s and also suggests how, as the parameters for clerical conformity shifted in the latter years of James's reign, Calvinist conformists found a new appeal in the works of moderate Puritans.

The history of Anglican temperance movements before the First World War reveals working-class influences on English vicarages (not yet recognised by historians) and a corresponding influence of the lower clergy on the Anglican establishment. A study of Anglican initiatives against drink may help provide missing links between the Biblethumping evangelicalism of wine-drinking William Wilberforce's time and the social gospel era of his grandsons, the clerical teetotallers, Basil and Ernest. After 1855, a significant minority of Anglican clergymen, obsessed with the estrangement of the lower orders from organised religion, accepted teetotalism, often at the urging of labourers. In so doing, they reversed somewhat the proposition enshrined in the evangelical tradition that true moral reform depended on the leadership of the privileged classes and the compliance of their social inferiors. Working-class teetotallers continued to exercise influence in parochial temperance organisations; more ambitiously, low-placed teetotal clergymen attempted, through the Church's teetotal society, to convert the highest Anglican dignitaries to total abstinence.

Andrew Holes, a canon lawyer working in the papal court, was one of the few foreigners really admired by Vespasiano da Bisticci. Roberto Weiss directed attention to him, but in 1944 Josephine Bennett for the first time thoroughly discussed his career, trying also to discover the titles of some of the books he bought in Florence. These were said by Vespasiano to be so numerous that he had to have them specially shipped home. In 1944 only about three were discoverable. Nor, of course, during the war was Bennett able to examine the sermon (known only in a Vienna manuscript) that Holes delivered at the English Hospice probably on Tuesday 7 July, 1433 for the Feast of the Translation of Thomas Becket, which would have been one way to investigate his attitudes. Weiss had examined the sermon and Bennett knew of it from him. However, to someone such as Weiss, primarily interested in the Renaissance viewed narrowly as the revival of the pagan classics, there was nothing in it of importance.

Liturgy, it has often been said, implies doctrine. Nowhere is this more patently clear than in the rubric before the second Exhortation ‘in case he [the Minister] shall see the people negligent to come to the Holy Communion’ in the Prayer Book of 1662. In view of the fact that ‘An Order for Holy Communion’ contained in the Report of the Liturgical Commission, April 1966, has departed from the valuable precedent of 1662, it may not be without contemporary value that we enquire into the origin, purpose and structure of this second Exhortation.

There is a large and complex literature regarding the part played by working-class Nonconformity in the industrial revolution and the emergence of the English labour movement. For all its nuances, this writing can be separated into two main strands. The first, broadly Marxist, perspective sees working-class Nonconformity primarily as a form of capitalist control, inculcating bourgeois norms of hard work, thrift, respectability and political moderation into the working class. However, even labour historians who subscribe to this view cannot help but be struck by the ubiquitous accounts of lay preachers at the forefront of Victorian labour movement campaigns, especially in the coalfields. Thus, the second view stresses the part played by working-class Nonconformists in leading their class towards political and industrial emancipation. To a considerable extent, the stance taken, particularly on Methodism, depends on whether writers draw their evidence from national, usually middle-class, denominational hierarchies, or from local accounts of working-class religiosity.

In autumn 1944, the British Ministry of Information sent one of its officials, the Revd Herbert M. Waddams, to Sweden and Finland. His task was to collect information about opinions in church circles in both countries and to try to persuade them to a more favourable attitude towards the Allies, especially the Soviet Union. Sweden had remained neutral throughout the war and Finland had just made peace with the Allies. Waddams's memoranda on the trip reveal how the assessment of the international situation by a representative of a British government ministry differed from that of churchmen in Sweden and Finland.

There are several reasons why the study of the works of Sidonius Apollinaris should be of particular interest to ecclesiastical historians. He represents in a peculiar way the end of the old régime, under which Christianity had taken root and had begun to spread, and the beginning of the new period which we call the Middle Ages. He was a devoted admirer of the Roman imperial system, a devotee of the Muses of Roman poetry and prose, but also, in the second part of his life, a bishop of the Christian Church. He was born about 430, when the emperor Valentinian III, who could be reasonably represented as the scion of a legitimate dynasty, was apparently in secure possession of the imperial throne. He died about 480, bishop of a see in a barbarian kingdom, a few years after the last Roman puppet-emperor had been dethroned. He has left us not only poems and panegyrics but also letters dealing, among other things, with the day-to-day problems of his see. His contribution to our knowledge of the Gallic Church of the mid-fifth-century—a dark period by any standard of measurement—must be of great value, and perhaps a fresh survey of certain aspects of it may not be unfruitful.

Dr. Philip McNair of Cambridge has written the definitive account of Pietro Martire Vermigli in Italy. After fleeing from Lucca (1542), Vermigli began his exile at Strasburg (1542–7), continued on to Oxford (1547–56) and ended a brilliant theological career at Zürich (1556–62). This scholar who so deeply impressed John Calvin merits serious attention. Recent articles point to Vermigli's influence on the Book of Common Prayer. It is time to add a preliminary study of his biblical exegesis to the scant secondary literature on Vermigli's theology. Here lies the fascination Vermigli held for both Calvin and Cranmer.

The public controversy over ritualism in the Church of England reached its peak in the 1870s, with the passing of the Public Worship Regulation Act and the attempts, eventually abandoned through use of the episcopal veto, to prosecute ritualist clergy for the use of technically illegal ceremonial ornaments or vestments. One other related subject that caused a similar degree of controversy at the time, though it has been less well remembered since, was the emphasis within ritualist circles on auricular or sacramental confession. The subject of auricular confession, made privately to a priest, was one of the most explosive religious issues, both morally and theologically, of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.