In most English minds, episcopal succession from the apostles is associated with the unbroken series of impositions of episcopal hands, stretching right back to certain layings-on of hands by apostles whereby the first bishops were set apart for an office that perpetuated something of apostolic authority. That this notion is thus prevalent is due to the Tractarians. Characteristic is their emphasis upon a particular action, the imposition of episcopal hands. Professor Einar Molland doubtless had this in his thought when, in the first issue of this Journal, he showed that Irenaeus, when upholding the importance of a regular and continuous succession from the apostles, laid no such emphasis on the imposition of episcopal hands. Professor Molland went on to indicate that Irenaeus himself cannot have received episcopal consecration at the hands of bishops. Only his fellow-presbyters of the Rhône valley can have solemnized his succession to the office of the martyred Pothinus. Professor Molland says, ‘Irenaeus may have been consecrated in the same way as the bishops of Alexandria’. It is probable that a majority of scholars hold the opinion that the early bishops of Alexandria received their episcopal office at the hands of their fellow-presbyters. Nevertheless Bishop Gore claimed that the opinion had not become a certainty, even after the discovery of the support it receives from Severus of Antioch. Gore saw clearly what were the consequences as touching the nature of valid episcopal succession, and endeavoured to maintain doubt concerning the fact of presbyteral ‘consecration’ at Alexandria.

Up till now the Egyptian government has not succeeded in arranging the purchase of the manuscripts forming the library of a Gnostic community living in the fourth century a.d. near the old site of Khenoboskion in Upper Egypt. But thanks to some preliminary studies we know the titles of the works copied in those manuscripts. When once these most important texts have been published we shall know much more about what the Egyptian Gnostics thought and taught in the fourth century in Upper Egypt.

It has long been a commonplace of Scottish ecclesiastical history that the culdees at St. Andrews, who held a place in the cathedral church in the earlier part of the twelfth century, survived for a further two hundred years. The most authoritative statement of this belief is still to be found in the work of Dr. William Reeves (later Bishop of Down), whose paper on ‘The Culdees of the British Islands’ was read to the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin in 1860, and published there as a book in 1864. Reeves's paper discussed very fully the origins and later history of the culdees in the British Isles, especially in Ireland and Scotland; and it is of some interest to recall that since the author was a vicar-choral of Armagh cathedral he belonged to a corporation which could claim to have directly represented, since the seventeenth century, the older body of culdees attached to the mother church of St. Patrick.

Until comparatively recently the origins of the movement known as the devotio moderna attracted curiously little attention in this country. It was judged too medieval and too orthodox in character to have had much influence upon the course of reform, and the Anglican habit of relating all reforming movements to the Reformation did not allow it its rightful place in the history of the Christian spiritual life; from another angle, the sarcasms of Erasmus in his Compendium Vitae cast doubts about the disinterestedness of its teaching, and raised among humanists suspicions that its aims and methods were ultimately obscurantist. Its reforming activities were mainly associated with the efforts of a single wing of, or group within, the movement that aimed at reforming the religious houses along the lines of the Augustinian convents of Agnetenburg and Windesheim, and small attention was paid to its appeal to the laity and its attempt to combat self-satisfied materialism among the prosperous middle classes in the towns. And the fact that it was, at any rate in its beginning, essentially a local movement, confined in the main to the western part of the ecclesiastical province of Cologne, still further confined its appeal.

Bancroft's celebrated sermon was delivered at St. Paul's Cross on 9 February 1588/9. Two editions appeared in England during the summer. The protests from English Puritans—Dr Reynolds of Oxford University, Sir Francis Knollys—soon died away. Bancroft was denouncing the puritan movement more forcibly than it had been denounced, but so far as England was concerned he was saying nothing which had not already been said by Anglican controversialists like John Whitgift, John Bridges, Thomas Cooper. The novelty of the sermon lay in its attitude to foreign churches. The presbyterian movement in England claimed the support of the protestant churches in Scotland, Holland, the Rhineland, Switzerland. Bancroft was not afraid to transform the denunciation of presbyterianism in England into a denunciation of Presbyterianism in general.