Among the many forms which were used by the early Church to accompany the baptismal washing we may certainly count those forms which are at present in use in the eastern and western Church. At a later stage in this study we shall examine their origin and ancestry. First it is necessary to draw attention to certain other forms which are attested by the Fathers in their writings and liturgical remains, and which appear to have been invested at one time with the same importance and to have fulfilled the same purpose as the formula which is universally used to-day.

The reign of Theodosius II, from 408 to 450, coincided with a crucial era in early Christianity. The doctrinal aspects of this era have been exhaustively studied. The following pages have been written in the hope of further clarifying this period by a review of the policies of Theodosius II in relation to real or imagined deviations from Christian orthodoxy.

‘Who won the Becket controversy?’ is not an unusual kind of question to appear in examination papers. The general idea of the answer has been, and still is in many quarters, to assign Thomas Becket to that large elysium for historical figures who by their death have won the victory for which they struggled in life. Those scholars, however, who have studied closely how some of the issues raised in the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) worked themselves out in practice after Becket's martyrdom, have show that things were not so simple. In the day-to-day relations of the secular and ecclesiastical courts a spirit of compromise and co-operation is constantly evident, and the developing complexity of legal problems and procedures favoured now one jurisdiction, now the other. In the relations of the English Church and the papacy ‘ecclesia Anglicana libera sit’ might sound very well as a battle-cry, but the English Church was far from agreed about how much it wanted to be free from the king in order to obey the pope. There were men in the decades after 1170 who would even have considered ‘compromise’ the wrong word to use about the situation. Gerald of Wales tells us that as Richard of Ilchester, bishop of Winchester, sat talking one day, he declared that the pusillanimity of the martyr's successor, Richard of Dover, had lost for the Church every point for which Becket had fought. This is an unlikely story for various reasons, but Gerald's anecdotal style often serves to reflect the thoughts of some of his contemporaries.

The religious settlement of 1553–4 rested no less upon the royal authority than its predecessor, or that which followed in 1559. Like the Elizabethan establishment it was the result of political compromise. To base a persecuting regime upon compromise was, as Elizabeth realised, both illogical and dangerous, but Mary's convictions did not allow her to acknowledge, or enable her to understand the foundations upon which her Church was built.

When students of early nineteenth-century ecclesiastical history come to compile a religious ‘map’ of England, their attention will be drawn to a matter commented upon often enough by contemporaries, but almost entirely neglected now—the catastrophic decline in the influence of the Church in much of the countryside. The greatest triumphs of Nonconformity were won in the rural areas of Wales, and by the time of the religious census in 1851 English Dissenters had established a long lead over the Church in the East and North Ridings of Yorkshire, in Lincolnshire and Bedfordshire, were ahead in Huntingdonshire, and were within striking distance of drawing level in Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Norfolk. In the southern and south-eastern counties the Church preserved its formal ascendancy, but often attracted a smaller proportion of the people to its services on census Sunday than in counties which were overrun by Dissent. The real tragedy for the Church in this period, it may be argued, was not that industrialisation concentrated people where her. endowments, manpower and accommodation were thinly spread, but that things went so badly where her resources were concentrated. It is the object of this paper to draw attention to this major question of ecclesiastical history and geography, and to suggest that part of the answer to it lies in the tithe question.