The early fourteenth century marks one of the most significant periods in the development of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. Not only did this period witness a profound transformation in the theological understanding of the older feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but it also brought about the active engagement of the laity in its celebration. In northern Italy the first lay confraternities dedicated to celebrating the feast of the Conception were founded in the 1320s and 1330s under the direction of the Franciscans, then the greatest advocates of the immaculist cause. This coincidence between the theological definition of Mary's conception, lay participation in the feast's celebration, and Franciscan sponsorship of confraternities raises interesting questions about the nature of lay piety and the role of lay associations in disseminating religious beliefs.

The question of when certain religious beliefs and their theological formulations become known and understood by the majority of the faithful is complex, particularly in the case of the Immaculate Conception. No explicit mention of Mary's sinless conception exists in Scripture or in apostolic teaching. Belief in the Immaculate Conception emerged only gradually, through centuries of reflection and disputation, and was not proclaimed a dogma of faith until 1854. This gradual unfolding of the doctrine has meant that identifying the shift from a general reverence for Mary's conception to an explicit belief in the sinlessness of her conception has proved difficult. A second difficulty is that for centuries the qualifier ‘immaculate’ was not attached to the name of the feast. During the Middle Ages the feast was referred to simply as the ‘Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary’ The mere observance of the feast, therefore, tells us little about what the faithful actually believed.

In his brief account of James Pilkington, bishop of Durham, F. O. White created an enduring myth. Citing only two documents from the state papers, he proposed the following scenario:

“Though Bishop Pilkington was a great iconoclast, he was a vigorous maintainer of the rights and property of his see. Shortly after his consecration he had received a partial restitution of his temporalities, but the restitution of the remainder was long delayed, it being felt by the queen and her ministers that the spiritual and temporal power of the Bishops of Durham was excessive.

Pilkington appears to have so pertinaciously insisted on his rights, and so strenuously refused to allow the bishopric to be spoliated, that the queen made him a prisoner in his own house, for we find him, in a letter to Sir W. Cecil, written just before the warrant for the restitution of his temporalities was issued (May 23, 1566), stating that then he was ‘at liberty to walk’, and ‘dared to go abroad into gardens’. At last the matter was arranged, and on June 13, 1566, the warrant was issued for the complete restitution of his temporalities, on the condition of his paying to the Crown £1000 a year during his life.”

This portrait of a Pilkington both combative and disgraced is entirely absent from the biographical account of him which prefaces the Parker Society edition of his Works. A few years later, however, the Coopers asserted that it was only ‘in consequence of his spirited remonstrances’ that his lands were fully restored. C. W. Sutton, writing a few years before White, rehearsed Henry Machyn's account of a sermon during which, in March 1560, Pilkington had demanded ‘better living’ for the bishops and clergy and went on to observe that he was ‘a great stickler for the rights and emoluments of his see’.

To Englishmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, few institutions inspired such horrified fascination as the Bedlam hospital, the principal London mad-house. Yet Bedlam, or to give it its proper title, the hospital of St Mary of New Bethlehem, had been in existence for several centuries before its principal charge became the care, or perhaps more correctly the confinement, of the insane. The origins of Bedlam lie in the 1240s, in the reign of King Henry III. To date, the circumstances which gave rise to the hospital's foundation have failed to attract the understanding and attention which they deserve. Bedlam's founders would no doubt have been surprised to learn of the subsequent fate of their institution, intended in origin not as a mad-house but as a link between England and the Holy Land, part of a wider movement in which the cathedral church of the Nativity at Bethlehem and its bishops sought land, alms and hospitality in western Europe. The purpose of this present essay is to investigate the links between England and the church of Bethlehem which gave rise to the foundation of Bedlam. In the process, it is hoped that new light will be shed upon English attitudes to the crusades, upon the reorganisation of the finances and administration of the bishops of Bethlehem exiled from the Holy Land after 1187, and in particular upon the career of one bishop, Goffredo de Prefetti. It was Goffredo who was to be personally responsible for the introduction of the Bethlehemites to England, and so it is with his career that we should commence.

On 9 April 1514 Tamás Bakócz, archbishop of Esztergom and cardinal-legate of Pope Leo X, initiated the preaching of a crusade against the Turks in Hungary. On 24 April György Dózsa Székely, a minor nobleman serving with the garrison of Belgrade who had experience of fighting the Turks, was appointed as commander of the crusading army. Dózsa marched southwards from Pest on 10 May with the main body of crusaders, some 15,000 strong, for the most part peasants. Five days later Archbishop Bakócz and the Hungarian royal council called a halt to the preaching. Their cancellation was provoked by the fact that the crusade preaching had generated alarming social unrest, and on 22 May an encounter occurred at Várad in which an army of crusaders defeated a force of nobles. The crusade was now showing all the features of an uprising, and two days after the battle of Várad, coincidentally on the same day that György Dózsa inflicted another defeat on the nobles at Nagylak, the king called off the crusade and ordered the peasant crusaders to return home. His command was ignored and attempts to organise local resistance against the various crusade armies met with only partial success. It proved necessary to recall János Zápolyai and the troops who were engaged against the Turks in the east. At the end of June Zápolyai marched in relief of Temesvár (Timisoara), the fortress which Dózsa was besieging, evidently with the plan to establish a strategic base between the Maros and the Danube. Here, on 15 July, the vojvoda smashed the crusading army and turned the tide of the revolt, which lasted for just a few more weeks.

Preaching before parliament in April 1571, the bishop of London, Edwin Sandys, lamented the low popular esteem which clergy enjoyed in the England of his own time, which encouraged the gospel message to be undervalued or ignored. Lay greed impoverished the Church, depriving God's ministers of their lawful maintenance. Little had changed since the break with Rome, when the crown and laymen began to secularise the church's lands and revenues in the name of religious reform. Sandys observed in sorrow that ‘the Gospel hath evil luck: it is never preached, but the patrimony thereof is pinched’. This Reformation legacy of lay sacrilege would haunt the English Church throughout the sixteenth century, and pose a serious threat to the preservation and advance of Protestantism. The sixteenth-century English Church faced fundamental economic problems, which hindered her clergy from fulfilling the increased pastoral duties demanded by reformers. While doctrine and liturgy were reformed, clerical finances and the parochial structure remained largely untouched. At the same time, the decline in offerings and payment of personal tithes, the prohibition of lucrative pilgrimages and prayers for the dead, and the fiscal consequences of the royal supremacy (especially increased taxation) all damaged clerical finances. Reform of the clerical economy was essential. While some wealthier clergy continued to prosper, the perception of poverty and decline became commonplace. Many commentators responded to rising lay and clerical expectation of ministers by stressing the urgent need to recover and reallocate the church's economic resources. At the heart of this discussion of ministers' maintenance lay an unresolved tension between a state Reformation with strong political and economic elements and a religious reform movement.

Publication of An essay on spirit in 1750 was, on the face of it, no particular landmark in the history of heterodoxy. There had been arguments in Anglican circles since the 1680s about ‘mystery’ and the Holy Trinity, all part of the assault on fundamental articles of belief waged by such critics as John Toland and Anthony Collins after the Revolution Settlement, a time when interest in Arian ideas was reviving among Isaac Newton's followers, particularly Samuel Clarke and William Whiston. An essay on spirit – this latest expression of a highly developed Arianism – was couched in scholastic, even esoteric language, of apparent interest only to controversialists on either side of the question. What, however, made it a cause célèbre was the talk from the moment it left the press that its author and apologist for what we have recently been reminded was the archetypal Christian deviation was none other than one of the most senior members of the Church of Ireland – the bishop of Clogher, Robert Clayton, himself an Englishman by birth. Though not every commentator could or would believe this ascription, the bishop himself never attempted to deny it and, before long, the unsettling evidence of the extent to which heresy had penetrated the highest circles of the Anglican establishment was beyond serious doubt. Its appearance (and the writings which followed) led to vigorous counter-blasts on both sides of the Irish Sea from a range of clerical and lay opinion that extended well beyond the confines of any church ‘party’. Having spent the previous half century countering, with some success, the different strains of deism and free-thinking on the frontiers of Anglicanism, a broad band of clergy was alarmed that Clayton's writings of the 1750s bore disturbing witness to the presence of traitors within the citadel who, in challenging the Church to tolerate their continued presence, were ready to endanger its moderate latitudinarian character. Moreover, An essay on spirit appeared at a time when the writings of Middleton and Hume also demanded the notice of theologians, and the ‘Church in Danger!’ had not ceased to be an appropriate battle cry to marginalised Tories.

There is no end in sight to historical squabbles about the speed, impact and enduring cultural and ecclesiastical legacies of the English Reformation. The past two decades have witnessed a lively and stimulating debate about the reception and entrenchment of Protestant belief and practice in local contexts. Over the same period we have seen a series of heated and animated exchanges about the developments taking place within the early Stuart Church and the role they played in triggering the outbreak of hostilities between Charles I and Parliament in 1642. While the focus of the first controversy has been the relationship between zealous Protestantism and the vast mass of the ordinary people, the second has been conducted almost exclusively at the level of the learned polemical literature of the clerical elite. So far little attempt has been made to bridge and span the gap. This is hardly surprising – sensible scholars think twice before venturing into two historiographical minefields simultaneously. Nevertheless the problem of reconciling these parallel but largely discrete bodies of interpretation and evidence remains, and it is one which historians like myself, whose interests straddle the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century divide and the Catholic–Protestant confessional fence, can no longer afford to sidestep and ignore. This essay represents a set of tentative reflections and speculations on recent research, a cautious exploration of three clusters of inter-related issues and themes.

In the spring of 1593 Richard Hooker published the first part of his work Of the laws of ecclesiastical polity which has come to be known as the most famous attempt to persuade Elizabethan Puritans to conform to the laws of the English Church. Hooker's writings have received more scholarly attention than those of any other contemporary church polemicist but no consensus has, as yet, been arrived at regarding the nature of his argument or the way in which his ideas addressed the major issues of Elizabethan church controversy. It is my intention in this essay to focus on these issues and thus provide some insight into the details of Hooker's theory of law and its broader significance as an argument relating to the legislative authority of the Church of England.

Notice is hereby given, that if any man be mindful to enlist in his Majesty's service, under the command of the Rev. Mr. George White, Commander-in-Chief, and John Bannister, Lieut.-General of his Majesty's forces for the defence of the Church of England, and the support of the manufactory in and about Colne, both which are now in danger, let him repair to the drum-head at the Cross, where each man shall receive a pint of ale in advance, and all other proper encouragements.

This notice, which was published at the height of the agitation which beset the forest of Pendle in the summer of 1748, conjures images beloved of the Methodist hagiographer. Assuming quasi-military titles, squire and parson rally a drink-sodden mob to do battle against the preachers of the Gospel, and all in the name of religion and commerce. Historians, however, are required to take a more dispassionate view of the motives and actions of those who, through violence or polemic, attempted to arrest the growth of the Evangelical Revival, a movement which was to prove one of the most influential religious and cultural movements in the history of the British Isles. John Walsh's pioneering essay on ‘Methodism and the mob’ was one of the first serious attempts to treat anti-Methodist agitation sympathetically, and to place it in the much broader context of the norms of popular protest in the eighteenth century. However, detailed academic studies of anti-Methodist protests remain scarce, and the strong correlation between these and other examples of popular hostility towards other deviant religious groups, such as Catholics, Nonconformists and Jews, remains understated.

Consider the central religious crisis in the life of each of three individuals. First, on 21 March 1748, in the belly of a ship in the dead of night, awakened by a raging North Atlantic storm which threatened to sweep all on board to a watery death, John Newton cries out to God for mercy. Second, at an insane asylum on 26 July 1764, William Cowper emerges from nearly a year of psychological derangement and repeated attempts at self-destruction, and, flinging himself into a window-seat in the parlour, he opens a Bible, reads, and falls into a spiritual reverie as a kind of divine light floods into his soul. And then third, after months of anxiety over his ineffectual pastoral ministry, and remorse over the levity with which he entered holy orders, Thomas Scott shuts himself up in his study with his Bible, the works of Richard Hooker and other Anglican divines, and by Christmas 1777 argues himself into evangelical conviction.

Traditionally scholars distinguish English Anglican cathedrals of ‘old’ foundation and those of ‘new’, but since Henry VIII a further category has arisen comprising those established in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to serve newly created dioceses. These are often referred to as parish-church cathedrals because they mostly remained parish churches even after their elevation. Their new status raised various architectual and organisational problems, and this essay concentrates on the latter, illustrating them with select examples. These problems deserve examination because there is little recent literature on them and some passing references may tend to mislead.

Two events define the period. In 1836 the first modern parish-church cathedral was created at Ripon. In 1931 the Cathedrals Measure provided for revision of all cathedral statutes within general guidelines, the outcome of a commission of enquiry which Church Assembly had launched in 1924 and which had reported in 1927. Moreover by 1931, albeit then unperceived, an era had ended in another respect because after a surge of creations in the 1920s, no more new bishoprics have been erected in England by the Anglican Church (despite various plans), though some territorial adjustments have been made between dioceses, notably the transfer of Croydon from Canterbury to Southwark. Throughout much of this period popular odium surrounded cathedral establishments, a residue from radical attack in the 1830s and 1840s upon all ecclesiastical corporations whose wealth, admittedly often maladministered, critics had hoped to appropriate to other uses, whose neglect of duties had become scandalous, and whose quirky and outmoded ways Trollope gently satirised in his Barchester novels. The period saw a piecemeal and relatively unco-ordinated response to the problems which creation of these cathedrals involved, and that Church Assembly commission explicitly deplored the ‘anomalous and confused’ situation which had arisen.

Phillips Brooks was undeniably one of the most popular preachers of Gilded Age America. Sydney Ahlstrom described Brooks and the liberal Congregationalist Henry Ward Beecher as ‘in a class by themselves, envied and emulated the country over’. Unlike Beecher, however, the rector of Trinity Church, Boston, subsequently Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts, has attracted remarkably little scholarly attention. His few biographers have rarely attempted to place his thought or career in their social or intellectual contexts. With one recent notable exception, little of scholarly value has been written about Brooks. The older biographies have tended to portray him as initially rooted in the evangelical tradition, even though he subsequently became a leader of the emergent Broad Church party. Alexander V. G. Allen concludes, for example, that by the close of his seminary training, Brooks ‘freely accepted the leading truths which are known as Evangelical’. E. Clowes Chorley asserts simply that ‘Brooks never drifted from the heart of Evangelical religion’. Allen and others stress the evangelical origins of Brooks's thought in order to argue for the continuity between the evangelical and liberal streams within American Anglicanism. This portrayal of Brooks as a churchman who somehow retained the essence of an early evangelicalism while later embracing his Church's liberal future has served what Allen Guelzo has aptly called the ‘myth of synthesis’ in Episcopal historiography. Such an interpretation does not view Evangelicals as being forced out of the Church in the 1870s but posits a benign creative synthesis that enabled the Church to transcend the aberrant party battles of the mid century.

The medieval canon law of affinity as an impediment to marriage combined a large range of prohibited degrees with a wide power of dispensation. After the Reformation, however, English law, in line with mainstream Protestant opinion, prohibited marriages within the degrees mentioned in Leviticus, with no provision for dispensation. The prohibited degrees were set out in ‘Archbishop Parker's Table’ in the Prayer Book, beginning with the memorable declaration that ‘A man may not marry his grandmother’. In the nineteenth century, however, some of these restrictions came to be challenged. The classic case was that of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, and it was under this title that successive bills were introduced to alter the law.

Until 1857 the law of marriage was administered by the ecclesiastical courts, according to the canon law. However, the civil courts modified and controlled this canon law by means of the writ of prohibition: canon law was now subordinate to common law, and where the two conflicted the civil courts would over-rule the ecclesiastical courts. Marriage with a deceased wife's sister was illegal, and, as with other impediments to marriage, a case could be brought in the ecclesiastical courts to have such a marriage declared void. A case on these grounds could only be brought during the lifetime of both spouses. Nevertheless, the marriage had theoretically been void ab initio, and even after one spouse had died the survivor could still be proceeded against for incest.

The Mill Yard Seventh Day Baptist Church, founded in the seventeenth century, had by the 1820s dwindled to a group of just seven women without a minister. One of their seventeenth-century forebears, Joseph Davis, a wealthy linen draper, had established a charitable trust for the purpose of perpetually supporting the cause of Seventh Day Baptists. He had entrusted to it the Mill Yard property in London – which gave the congregation its name – and the task of paying the minister's salary, as well as listing some other suitable beneficiaries. In 1830, however, the trustees at that time resolved to give the property to another congregation on the grounds that the historic Mill Yard church had ceased to exist. The members – all women – protested that they were a true church and all parties agreed to take the case for arbitration to the General Body of Protestant Dissenting Ministers – a ministerial society comprised of the bulk of the Independent, Baptist and Presbyterian ministers in London and its vicinity. Thus, for several days in 1831, many of the most prominent Nonconformist ministers of that era gave themselves to passing judgement on the theological legitimacy or otherwise of the unusual situation arrived at by a remnant of this obscure religious group, providing us with a unique opportunity to discover Dissenting attitudes during that period toward the relationship between gender and the very nature of the Church itself.

The year 1998 sees the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the World Council of Churches. Great, but subsequently largely disappointed hopes, greeted it. The movement that led directly to its formation had its genesis in the International Missionary Conference of 1910, an event often cited in popular surveys as marking the beginning of the Ecumenical Movement. This paper will, however, argue that modern ecumenism has a complex series of roots. Some of them predate that conference, significant though it was in leading to the ‘Faith and Order’ movement that was, in its turn, such an important contributor to the genesis of the World Council.

Archbishop William Temple, who played a key role in both the ‘Faith and Order’ and ‘Life and Work’ movements, referred to the Ecumenical Movement as the ‘great fact of our times’. This was a gross exaggeration. It is true that the movement engaged, from about 1920 onwards, a very considerable amount of the energy of the most talented and forward-looking leaders and thinkers of the Churches in the Anglican and Protestant traditions. It remained, however, marginal in the life of the Roman Catholic Church until Vatican II, despite the pioneering commitment of some extremely able people amidst official disapproval. Some leaders of the Orthodox Church took a considerable interest in the movement. However, both the official ecclesiology and the popular stance of most Orthodox precluded any real rapprochement with other Churches on terms that bore any resemblance to practicality. Even in the Anglican and mainstream Protestant Churches, the movement remained largely one of a section of the leadership. It attained little genuine popularity, a fact that was frequently admitted even by its most ardent partisans. One could well say that the Ecumenical Movement had only one really solid achievement to celebrate in 1948. This was the formation, in the previous year, of the Church of South India, the first Church to represent a union across the episcopal–non-episcopal divide. This type of union has yet to be emulated outside the Indian sub-continent.

One of the aims of this article will be to try to explain why success in India went unmatched elsewhere. The emphasis will be on the English dimension of the problem, though many of the factors that affected the English situation also obtained in other countries in the Anglo-Saxon cultural tradition. This assessment must be balanced, however, by an appreciation of the real progress made in terms of improved and even amicable church relationships.

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.

It was long a commonplace of Reformation history that John Bale, the Catholic friar turned Protestant firebrand, was during his time at Cambridge University a member of Jesus College. This received wisdom was enshrined in the pages of such standard reference works as Cooper and Venn, and was regularly repeated, where appropriate, in histories of the university and of the English Reformation. This was not questioned until J. Crompton observed over thirty years ago that there was no foundation for this tradition. Crompton's lead was followed some years later by L. P. Fairfield, who reiterated in his study of Bale that there was ‘no evidence whatever that Bale ever became a member of Jesus College’. However, despite these categorical conclusions, the editor of Bale's surviving plays, Peter Happé, now the leading authority on Bale's life and works, has recently maintained that after all he ‘probably entered Jesus College’. In making this claim, Happé argues partly from a passage in Bale's own writings relating to his connection with two early Fellows of Jesus College, Geoffrey Downes and Thomas Cranmer, and partly from a later tradition of Bale's membership attested in a seventeenth-century manuscript history of the college. A close analysis of the evidence, however, corroborates the contention of Crompton and Fairfield, and indicates that the later tradition arose from a misinterpretation by the Stuart antiquary Thomas Fuller of Bale's own recollections.

Until recently, the Humiliati of northern Italy have not been fortunate in their historiography. If they are known to Anglophone medievalists, it is usually in walk-on parts, either as the heretics condemned in the bull Ad abolendam at the Council of Verona in 1184, or as the pious enthusiasts, precursors of the mendicants, who were recognised and approved by Innocent III in 1201. Although they went on to play a prominent role in many north Italian regions, the later history of the Humiliati has frequently been treated with indifference, except perhaps by those interested in the development of the north Italian wool industry. This is partly because, unlike their contemporaries the Waldensians, the Humiliati did not have to keep defending themselves: their orthodoxy was not long questioned and they became part of the backbone of the religious communities of north Italian cities, taken for granted and largely untrumpeted. Their lack of ‘history’ also reflects the failure of the order to survive the Counter-Reformation. When one of the brethren, objecting strongly to attempts by Carlo Borromeo to reform their much decayed houses, tried quite literally to shoot the messenger, the male order was abruptly disbanded and most of the sources for their communities were dispersed. They thus lack either the later brethren interested in the origins of their own congregation who have so often driven the history industry of other religious orders, or a convenient body of sources on which to base such work.

In the summer of 1543 King Henry VIII promised that he would send 40,000 ducats, the equivalent of £10,000, to Ferdinand, king of the Romans and of Hungary, archduke of Austria, to help his brother, Emperor Charles V, in his defence of Christendom against the Turk. Europe witnessed a strange alliance between Henry, himself a schismatic monarch, and Charles, who had effectively blocked Henry's attempts to have the pope annul his first marriage. The coalition of opposing forces was equally remarkable, comprising the Most Christian King of France and his non-Christian ally, the Turk. Francis's support for the Turks was contrasted by some with the king's attitude to Protestant reform. Francis seems to have regretted the presence in 1543–4 of a Turkish colony at Toulon, which appears to have possessed a slave market and mosque. The alliance between Charles V and Henry VIII attests to the persistence of the medieval concept of Christendom (Christianitas), groups of nations which shared basic religious and cultural values despite the religious divides being caused by the Reformation.

Henry made elaborate plans to furnish Charles with the promised £10,000 to support military action on the continent. The money, available either as cash or as bills of exchange, was released in two halves, the first on 16 August 1543 and the second on 18 September. In his usual way, the imperial ambassador in England, Eustace Chapuys, made things worse by harrying the Privy Council for speedy payment of the funds. The crown, none the less, hit on an interesting solution to the problem of recovering its money. Henry issued an appeal to every diocese in England to organise voluntary contributions from parishioners to recover the amount of money he disbursed abroad. Working from the financial returns among the exchequer subsidy rolls at the Public Record Office, Dr Kitching has calculated that such collections raised no more than £1,903 8s. 3d., less than a fifth of the money advanced to Charles V. The English parishes reimbursed the crown in late 1543 and early 1544.

As Dr Kitching himself has indicated, the background to the whole episode is poorly documented. Previously unknown to historians, however, important material concerning the king's plan survives in the diocesan archives of London and Westminster. The episcopal registers of Edmund Bonner, bishop of London, and Thomas Thirlby, bishop of the short-lived see of Westminster, both shed valuable light on this scheme. Diocesan bishops recorded their formal administrative acts in registers, the compilation of which was supervised by the diocesan registrar. Unfortunately, the archiepiscopal archives at Lambeth are silent on the collections of 1543. The registers for the dioceses of London and Westminster, however, are particularly informative for the opening years of the Reformation. It is my purpose to consider the nature of the new evidence and to offer a transcript of the more important documents.

The year 1804 was something of a watershed in British church history. In that year the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded, the first large-scale experiment in ecumenicism, uniting evangelicals of various stripes and colours in a gigantic publishing venture that would cover the globe with Bibles printed in every language known to humanity. A key ingredient that would enable various Churches to work together in this massive ecumenical enterprise was a strict rule, to which all subscribed, stating that only the Authorised Version of the Bible would be published and that these Bibles would be circulated ‘without note or comment’. This rule, known as ‘The Fundamental Principle’, was designed to protect the Bible Society from accusations that it was promoting a seditious or heterodox document. Moreover, governance of the new society would be equally divided between Churchmen and Dissenters. In this way it was hoped that Baptists and non-Baptists, Calvinists and Arminians, Dissenters and Anglicans, could forget that which divided them, and join together in publishing and distributing a book to which they all subscribed. And to a large degree the Bible Society was successful in this enterprise, circulating 4,252,000 Bibles by 1825 and uniting many denominations and Churches in the process. In the year 2004, the Bible Society will celebrate its bicentennial, still intact as an ecumenical institution.

Yet in the early years of its history, achieving consensus over the translation and distribution of the Bible proved problematic. A case in point involved Baptist and Anglican evangelicals in West Bengal, India, where ecumenical co-operation worked for a season, but only as long as certain cherished theological principles were kept sacred. Thus when these evangelicals engaged in a joint enterprise to translate the Bible into the Eastern and Oriental languages under the auspices of the Bible Society, co-operation gave way to bitter controversy over how to translate key biblical concepts sacred to each group.

This paper studies the challenges to pan-evangelical co-operation in the Bible Society through a little known episode that took place in and around Calcutta and which covered the first forty years of the Bible Society's history. It first examines the forces which brought Baptists and Anglicans together in a common quest to translate and distribute Bibles. Next it outlines the stresses and strains which this activity produced between Baptist and paedobaptist members of the Bible Society in England and between William Carey and his Anglican counterparts in India. It ends by describing the schism that resulted in the creation of the Bible Translation Society, an event which proved that the Bible could be a force for division as well as for unity. Along the way, we get a candid glimpse of interpersonal relationships between evangelical leaders of the day. They emerge not as the unsullied saints often portrayed by their official biographers, but as fallible human beings. This understanding gives us a more realistic view of the people who guided the nineteenth-century evangelical revival, both their strengths and their shortcomings.