This paper attempts to explore a number of inter-related ideas—inter-related in so far as they are all concerned in one way or another with evil, and God's relationship with it. The belief most characteristic of Christianity is the assurance that redemption from evil has been achieved for mankind in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Our first enquiry is concerned with a basic contradiction in the accounts of this belief given in Greek Patristic literature. Secondly, attention will be drawn to the tension between this characteristically Christian affirmation and the efforts of Christian thinkers of the period to produce a rationally-based theodicy—that is, their treatment of the problem of evil as traditionally understood. The conclusion raises the question whether our findings require us to charge the Greek Fathers with incoherence in their theology.

Fourteenth-century records give a depressing picture of the finances of the Cistercian Order. In 1338, for instance, the Chapter General stated that the Order was heavily in debt at the papal curia and in the fairs of Champagne, and that its income was not sufficient to meet all its obligations. Its immunity from papal and royal taxation had been largely eroded in the thirteenth century. During the Avignon period the popes levied frequent property taxes from the Church in France, and by an arrangement with the French monarchy, the lion's share of the profits went to the king. In this way Philip VI obtained money from the Church during the Hundred Years’ War. The premier abbeys of the Cistercian Order, and its other houses within the kingdom, were not exempt from these exactions, and no doubt shared the distress of the French clergy. In 1362 Urban V refused to levy another property tax from the Church in France, on the grounds that it had paid more than enough.

One of the consequences of the Reformation in England (as elsewhere) was that for Protestants, at least, the image of sainthood changed considerably. Erasmus's Colloquies had poked fun at the kind of saint honoured by the Golden Legend; and Thomas Cromwell drove the point home in his Injunctions of 1536 and 1538. ‘New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth …’ and a new cause naturally creates its new heroes. The changing conception of sainthood in sixteenth-century England, culminating in Foxe's Actes and Monuments, has attracted not a little modern scholarly attention, as for example in Helen C. White's Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs. But one pivotal figure in this development deserves more intensive study: John Bale (1495–1563), the famous antiquary, dramatist and protestant propagandist. In the 1540s Bale published works on two protestant ‘saints’—Sir John Oldcastle and Mistress Anne Askew—which did much to imprint the new definition of sainthood on the English mind. For these little tracts alone (and particularly in the light of Bale's later relationship with John Foxe) Bale's contribution to protestant hagiography invites a closer look.

The Presbyterian congregation which used to meet in Tothill Street, Westminster, during the later Stuart period is now chiefly remembered for its succession of distinguished pastors. There were three of them, each a figure of importance in the dissenting community of London: first Thomas Cawton, a Bartholomean, under whose direction the congregation was formed and held together in the precarious years following the enactment of religious Uniformity; then Vincent Alsop, an accomplished controversialist who took issue with the doctors of the Church of England, and who, for a quarter of a century, faithfully tended his flock in good times and bad; finally there was Dr. Edmund Calamy, the learned historian of Caroline nonconformity, one of a new generation of Presbyterian divines, during whose early ministry the meeting removed from Tothill Street to other and more spacious premises in the nearby Princes Street. Our present purpose is to take a closer look at one of these ministers, the middle one—Vincent Alsop, ‘a man of great worth and piety’, who superintended his Westminster congregation from 1677 to 1703, the year of his death. His ministry, as we shall show, was to make an important contribution to the emancipation of Old Dissent, especially in the 1680s.