The origins of the ‘montanist’ heresy are far from clear. This much is known, that it began in Phrygia (or Mysia) and that it must have originated before 172, when Montanus had his visions, and before 179, when the prophetess Maximilla is said to have died. It is also conjectured that ‘Montanism’, a name which does not occur before the fourth century, may have been a title attached to the heresy later, and that the earlier names ‘the New Prophecy’ and the ‘Phrygian or Kataphrygian heresy’ are more exact connotations for the movement. Of the two names I should prefer the first, for ‘the New Prophecy’ does not seem to have been a heresy in its beginnings: doctrinal aberrations came only in the later centuries. In view of these facts it is legitimate to ask whether ‘the New Prophecy’ was a Judeo-Christian group which broke off from the Church and still later became heretical, that is, that the movement existed in essence before the time of Montanus and his ladies but that it was only in his day that it became a separate movement.

A commonplace which arises early and persists long in patristic literature is that doctrinal aberrations are generally traceable to the influence of Greek philosophical schools. But particularly in Epicureanism do the Fathers find a useful club with which to beat an astonishing variety of heretics.

It will be convenient to mention at the outset the way in which Origen ascribes to Epicurean influence the unorthodox views of his pagan opponent, Celsus. The opinions of Celsus in which Origen claims to detect latent Epicureanism concern a variety of topics.

For the first three hundred years or so of its existence after its refoundation in the mid-tenth century, the abbey of Abingdon was one of the most important Benedictine monasteries in England, comparable with Glastonbury, Bury St. Edmund's, St. Alban's and others of like standing. In the later middle ages its influence was much diminished, and its abbots were not on the whole distinguished for such virtues as reforming zeal, or for the cultivation of the arts and learning. Nevertheless, the written records show that this house, judged by the purely material standards of its net financial assets and of the extent and grandeur of its buildings, was still one of the great abbeys of the kingdom; in 1538, when it was dissolved, it was the sixth most wealthy monastery in England.

The recent publication of Mr. Nicholl's ‘Life’ of Thurstan, archbishop of York (1114–1140), has made this subject once more topical: and, indeed, for twelfth-century historians at least it will always be interesting. One of the constant themes of the century, and of the 1120s and 1130s in particular, was the question of the state, position and purpose of monks. The ‘monastic centuries’ were ending and the age of the secular masters had begun. The social purposes that the monasteries had served in the tenth and eleventh centuries were becoming less obvious and outdated. It was necessary that the position of the whole monastic order in society should be reconsidered and this roused strong feelings and bitter controversy. This controversy took place not only outside the monasteries but inside them as well and the great abbey of St. Mary's York is one of the houses where such controversy can be seen and studied.

On 22 February 1546 Martin Luther's body was laid to rest in the church at Wittenberg. Fourteen years and two months later Philip Melanchthon was interred at his side. In the funeral oration at the bier of Luther, Melanchthon included a prayer. It reads (in John Bale's translation, printed already in 1546):

‘We thanke the omnipotent God, the eternal father of our lorde Jesus Christ, the onlye founder of thy true churche, togeyther with thy sonne vnto the coeternal, our lorde Jesus Christ, and the holye ghostye, wyse, good, mercyfull, rythouse, true, myghtye, and most liberall, that thu gatheryst vnto that sonne of thyne the promised herytage out of mankynde, and vpholdest the true mynysterye of thy Gospell, specyallye now that thu hast restored yt vnto vs by thy faythfull seruauvt Luther. The we most hartelye desyre, that from hens fourth thu wystaue to preserue and gouerne that true congregacyon of thyne, and that thu firmelye plante in vs the most sure doctyrne, lyke as Esaias desyered vnto hys dyscyples, and lighten our myndes with thy most holye sprete, that we maye both ryghtlye call vpon the, and also leade a godlye conuersacyon. Amen’.

In this Journal Dr. G. F. Nuttall has reviewed the records which he re-discovered of the Baptist Western Association 1653–8. Meanwhile, unknown to him, a MS. had come into the hands of Dr. E. A. Payne which reported the proceedings of a similar association centred in Berkshire for the period 1652–60 and which he deposited in the Angus Library at Regent's Park College, Oxford, where it has lain unused for some years past. Since, either in MS. or in print, there are now known to exist the records for five similar organisations during the period of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate, namely, the two already mentioned, together with those in Wales, the English Midlands and Ireland, the time seems appropriate for a study of the organisation of the Particular Baptists during this period in Britain as a whole. Whilst there are no similar records extant for the London congregations there is clear evidence, as it is hoped to show in this paper, that the churches of the capital did associate and that they initiated and fostered closer relations between themselves and those of the provinces.

The second English delegation to the Council of Basel arrived there in August 1434 and remained until the summer of the following year. Its members, unlike their predecessors in the delegation of 1433, took the oath of incorporation and the brief period of their attendance was virtually the extent of England's official participation in the council. The purpose of this article is to re-examine the episode of the second delegation of which no comprehensive account has appeared since Dr. August Zellfelder published his study of England and the council in 1913.

‘War! That is the enduring condition of the Church on this earth. That is what the word means when we call her militant. And war means an enemy, an opposing spirit. You can have no warfare without there be two mutually opposing spirits’.

This makes an impressive opening to a sermon. It would have served as a summons to a Crusade. And, in a sense, so it was—at least in the mind of the preacher, John Neville Figgis, priest of the Community of the Resurrection, when he chose to startle the congregation of All Saints', Margaret Street, by portraying for them the likeness of Antichrist.

‘About that time [1567–8] there were many congregations of the Anabaptists in London, who called themselves Puritans or Unspotted Lambs of the Lord. They kept their church in the Minories without Aldgate’.

This paper is an attempt to develop the clue handed down to us by John Stow to the location of an early—if not the earliest—thoroughgoing nonconformist congregation within the Elizabethan Church. Considering the length of time it has been in print, it is a clue strangely neglected by historians both of nonconformity and of London during this period.

The county of Chester between 1750 and 1850 affords an interesting field of study into the impact on religion of the Industrial Revolution and the consequent great, mainly urban, population growth. In the east where the Cheshire plain swells to low foothills, which in turn give way to the gaunt moorlands and windswept heights of the Pennines, in the early stages of the Revolution factory villages were established in places where streams provided water power; in the lower part of the curious salient of the county which sunders Lancashire from Derbyshire by thrusting up to Holme Moss, cotton mills, print works, and collieries sprang up as the basis of a fairly dense population in what had hitherto been a district of small importance. By 1800 Stockport with its power spinning and hand weaving of cotton, its bleaching, printing, and hatting industries, had surpassed the ancient city of Chester in population. Ten miles to the south lay Macclesfield in which the older manufacture of silk buttons had been largely eclipsed by silk throwing and weaving. In a maturer phase of the Revolution, from about 1820, for the first time the western part of the county became involved. The expanding population of Liverpool crossed the Mersey in the recently introduced steam ferries to occupy the opposite shore at Birkenhead. Until that time the Wirral peninsular (of which Birkenhead is a part) had remained remote and undeveloped and notably conservative in religion. In 1850 the rest of the county, interspersed with quiet country towns such as Northwich, Knutsford and Congleton, was still overwhelmingly rural and agricultural. Thus, Cheshire affords within itself a contrasting variety of rural life and of earlier and later industrialism.

Among the evangelical leaders who flourished in the middle of the nineteenth century, surprisingly little has been written about J. C. Miller, who attained in Birmingham the same degree of importance as McNeile in Liverpool and Stowell in Manchester. He never became a bishop or a dean, no one wrote an official biography of him, and except for an article in the Dictionary of National Biography information about him is not readily available.