Among the archives belonging to the diocese of London and housed in two muniment rooms in St. Paul's Cathedral, is a bundle of papers labelled ‘Certificates as to Papists, 1706’. Curiosity having tempted me to undo and examine its contents, I now give a survey of the documents therein contained, believing that this may prove to be of value in two respects: first, as throwing new light upon members of a proscribed religion at a time which, so far as can be ascertained from books and records in libraries, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, is very poorly documented; secondly, as giving yet another insight into the character and outlook of a section of the Anglican clergy at the beginning of the eighteenth century.

In 1541 the new bishopric of Chester was compounded of the archdeaconries of Richmond and Chester, severed respectively from the vast sees of York and Lichfield. The annexing of Chester to Richmond, though not originally intended, seemed reasonable on geographical grounds, since they had a common boundary, the Ribble, in Lancashire. It may have been prompted also by the fact that since 1529 Dr. William Knight had held both archdeaconries in plurality, so that their surrender (for which he received the see of Bath and Wells) presented no great difficulties. As for the head of the diocese, Chester was the obvious place, having from 1075 to 1102 housed the cathedra which Lanfranc had moved from Lichfield; this brief elevation of Chester in the eleventh century was tenaciously commemorated long after the bishops had ceased to style themselves by that title in the 1140s, and as late as 1522 a royal minister in an official record could write of ‘the bishop of Chester’, meaning Blythe, bishop of Coventry and Lichfield. Furthermore, Chester was the most substantial town in the proposed diocese and in it there was an institution fit to be a cathedral: St. Werburgh's abbey, of great antiquity and wealth, and lately dissolved. In Richmond archdeaconry the claims of Fountains abbey, at first seriously entertained, were jeopardised by its remote and sparsely inhabited location. Another factor, too, may have operated in the separation of Chester archdeaconry from the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield, in its union with Richmond, and in its selection for the bishop's seat, for in some ways it had fitted as uncomfortably into that diocese as Richmond had into York.

The history of the Established Church from the 1740s to the 1830s is viewed as a period of inertia and complacency. Failure to respond to the exigencies of the economic and demographic revolutions resulted in the increasing weakness of the National Church when compared with extra-establishment religion. In the face of increasing pastoral responsibilities, the Church was slow to augment its existing accommodation, or to respond to the challenge of modifying the ancient parochial structure in the face of patron and incumbent interest, and increasing Nonconformist hostility. The resulting decline of the Church from its near monopoly position in 1800, to that of a minority Establishment by 1851, is well documented. Yet while the general pattern of Church extension is known, there have been few studies of the Anglican decline at the diocesan level. Of the twenty-seven dioceses in existence in 1800 one is of particular importance – the diocese of Durham, ‘where the Church was endowed with a splendour and a power unknown in monkish times and in Popish countries’. Here the Church possessed its greatest concentration of resources; here also it was to suffer its greatest reverses.

Early pentecostals thought the world of themselves and they assumed that everyone else did too. Not always positively, of course, but frequently, and with secret envy. In one sense it is difficult to imagine how pentecostals could have been more wrong. Till the 1950s most Americans had never heard of them. A handful of observers within the established Churches noticed their existence, and maybe a dozen journalists and scholars took a few hours to try to figure out why a movement so manifestly backward could erupt in the sunlit progressivism of the early twentieth century. But for the American public as a whole, that was about all there was. In another sense, however, pentecostals' extravagant assessment of their own importance proved exactly right. Radical evangelicals, pentecostals' spiritual and in many cases biological parents, marshalled impressive resources to crush the menace in their midst. Abusive words flew back and forth for years, subsiding into sullen silence only in the 1930s. Things improved somewhat after World War II, but even today many on both sides of the canyon continue to eye the other with fear and suspicion.

‘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.