As the starting-point of this paper I take the question, When did the Church come into existence? It is a question to which a great variety of answers is given; but they can be classified in two groups according to whether they put the birth of the Church before or after the death of Christ. These two groups again correspond roughly with two ways of thinking about the Church. We may think of it primarily as an organization with a function to perform; and in that case we shall think—as I do—of its coming into being at the moment that Jesus called his first disciple. Or we may think of it as a body of people who possess a certain status before God—forgiven sinners, redeemed persons or the like—and in that case we shall tend to think of its coming into being as a sequel to the completed redemptive work of Christ on the Cross.

In order to grasp the idea of the Apostolic Succession underlying Irenaeus' utterances on this subject we shall first analyse two different conceptions of the Succession which we meet with in modern times. I think it will be a help to see him against this background since it will enable us to perceive the specifically Irenaean idea of what the ‘succession from the apostles’ implies.

In its directions for the procedure to be followed at the consecration of a bishop, the document now generally accepted as the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus of Rome contains, as is well known, the text of an anaphora or eucharistic prayer. Apart from several phrases, preserved in the anaphora of Apostolic Constitutions viii, the original Greek of the prayer attributed to Hippolytus is lost. For its textual basis, therefore, we must turn to what is clearly the most faithful version of the original, as well as the oldest, the Latin of the Verona palimpsest recovered by E. Hauler and published by him in 1900. The anaphora is here introduced by the traditional dialogue consisting of ‘Dominus vobiscum’, ‘Susum corda’ and ‘Gratias agamus domino’, and their responses.

The story of the conflict between Archbishop Winchelsey and the abbot and monks of St Augustine's, Canterbury, was told nearly a hundred years later by William Thome, the monk who wrote a history of the monastery to the year 1397. That history attracted Sir Roger Twysden, the Kentish squire who was a historian and an antiquary and a pioneer in medieval scholarship; he included it in a notable publication, the Historiae Anglicanae Scriptores Decem, printed in 1652. Thorne's narrative was of absorbing interest to William Prynne, the Puritan scholar who became Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London in 1662; he printed extracts from Thorne in his magnum opus, ‘An exact chronological vindication of our king's supreme ecclesiastical jurisdiction over all religious affairs,’ and supplemented them with quotations from the Close Rolls in his charge, a truly laborious search as it appears to the historian of to-day who is aided by the Calendars printed for the Public Record Office.

Everybody who knows the ABC of the history of the Roman liturgy has undoubtedly heard of the story about the fourteenth-century dean of Tongres, Ralph van der Beke (de Rivo). His education in matters ecclesiastical had been splendid; his zeal for the reform of the Church was fervent and sincere; he was especially devoted to a revival of the liturgy of his time and the problems which he raised are accepted as being of the greatest importance. But this is not the whole story. Ralph's life does not lack a certain note comigue which is not often heard of. Ralph had his weaknesses: one of them was a whole-hearted aversion to the Friars Minor, who a century before had occasioned a liturgical reform in the Church, the consequences of which he saw every day and simply did not like. Until someone has checked Ralph's personal connections with the friars and the influence which he underwent from those Italians, who, under a show of zeal for the Eternal City, hid their jealousy and selfinterest and disputed everything concerning the papal court at Avignon, it is difficult to decide whether he could not stand the friars because of their Roman liturgy or the Roman liturgy because of the friars. All the same, whatever they did, for Ralph it was always wrong, and the most flattering thing which he could find in his heart was that those friars singularem usum cum regula servant singulari, as though it were a crime to follow the customs of the pope and nothing but praiseworthy to keep to those of the bishop of Liège or Lyons, or even the abbot of Cluny or Montecassino.

It is probably true to say that the unique and peculiar course taken by the English Reformation under Henry VIII, in so far as its origin can be traced to any one man, is due to Thomas Cromwell. Not that he was, as we shall endeavour to show, a theorist of church reform, still less a theologian. Nor did he, any more than any other servant of Henry VIII, at any time hold supreme power. Of all English monarchs Henry might perhaps dispute with Charles VII of France the title of le bien servi; but he was never dominated by his ministers, and made and broke them at will. Yet Cromwell possessed two qualities without which it is hard to see how the Henrician revolution in Church and State relations could have been carried through. He was diligent and methodical to a degree. ‘The whole essence of Cromwell's personality’, says his biographer, ‘consists of different manifestations of one fundamental, underlying trait, which may perhaps be best expressed by the common phrase “a strict attention to business”.’ No man was better fitted to carry through a complicated and slow programme with unhurrying persistence to a triumphant conclusion. Equally he was a man capable of bold and novel designs which might never have occurred, at least in a practical form, to ordinary minds. For both these reasons he was indispensable to Henry VIII in the crisis of the reign. The king, at least in his younger days, was not fond of detailed business; nor, to all appearance, was he gifted with originality above the common measure. Cromwell, with his capacity for detail and his power of imagination, complemented his master. As not infrequently happens, the second-in-command was the more essential member of the working partnership; one can imagine some king other than Henry VIII capable of carrying through Henry's achievement, but it is difficult to conceive how he could have done so without a Cromwell at his elbow.

On the 10th November 1540 considerable attention was excited in the imperial city of Worms by the arrival of a blind Scot. He came with Bishop Tommaso Campeggio of Feltre, Papal Nuncio Extraordinary, to take part as a papal theologian in the discussion between Catholics and Protestants arranged by the Emperor Charles V. The German theologians, who were already there awaiting the opening of the discussion, had difficulty in concealing their surprise, and a jest—‘Legatus caecus oculatis Germanis’—was soon coined.

Towards the end of a list, in his autobiography, of ‘Manuscripts that are yet unprinted, which lye by me’, Richard Baxter did not scruple to include ‘And a Multitude of Theological Letters’. It is an indication of the seriousness with which he regarded his correspondence. That Matthew Sylvester, Baxter's literary executor and the editor of his autobiography, the Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), also regarded it seriously appears from his inclusion of some thirty-five letters in the body of that work, with one in the preface and several others in appendices.

‘A gentleman having said that a congé d'élire has not, perhaps, the force of a command, but may be considered only as a strong recommendation: “Sir,” replied Johnson, who overheard him, “it is such a recommendation as if I should throw you out of a two pair of stairs window, and recommend you to fall soft”.’ The vigour of Dr Johnson's forthright observation is evident; but not uncommonly in constitutional history the preservation of outward forms, from which the living spirit seems long to have departed, may be of great value in continuing a tradition, which unexpected changes in circumstances may restore to influence. The good doctor himself declared his readiness to ‘stand before a battery of cannon to restore the Convocation to its full powers’; and it was the careful maintenance of the external forms of convocational procedure during its protracted hibernation between 1717 and 1852 which enabled its restoration to its full powers during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Thus it might not be unexpected that when so learned a scholar and stickler for traditional forms as William Wake was nominated to the see of Canterbury, he should take especial pains to ensure that all the customary stages were most carefully followed and fulfilled.

In these days the compilation of a bibliography of the publications of recent years is an exasperating occupation: if a book or journal has not been destroyed by bombing, it will probably be out of print, and it is not easy to understand why so many obstacles are set in the way of a free commerce in books. The result has been that students have tended to limit themselves to recording the works published in their own country. Take, for example, the field of Byzantine studies: A. Grabar has reported on ‘La Byzantinologie française pendant la Guerre 1940–45”, Byzantion, 17 (1944–5), 431–8; Wilhelm Ensslin has written a valuable critical report on German work on Byzantine history for the years 1939–47, Byzantion, 17 (1946–8), 261–302, cf. Klio 33 (1940), 349–68, 35 (1942), 164–77; in Byzantinoslavica there has appeared a series of bibliographical reports: Grabar for France in 9 (1947), 126–32, Ostrogorsky and Radolchich for Yugoslavia, ibid., 133–42; Lebedev for Russia (1936 to 1946), ibid., 97–112; M. Paulova for Czechoslovakia, ibid., 144–7; Runciman for Turkey, ibid., 143–4; A. Elian for Roumania, ibid., 393–405; Anguélov and Dimitrov for Bulgaria, ibid., 355–78; Moravcsik for Hungary, ibid., 379–92; Charanis for the United States, ibid., 342–54; for the British Isles Hussey and Baynes, ibid., 113ñ26, while Soloviev has written on Byzantine work published in Yugoslavia (1937 to 1947) in Byzantion 17 (1946–8), 303–10 and Delvoye has reported on Travaux récents sur les Monuments byzantins de la Grèce (1938ñ47), ibid., 229–60 and has studied L'Ecole Française d'Athènes et les Etudes Byzantines, R.E.B., 6 (1948), 86–93.