The Emperor Julian the Apostate (361–3) tried to reverse the policy of his kinsman Constantine the Great by restoring the pagan cults which he had subverted. One of his measures was to appoint chief priests for each province. Towards the end of his brief reign Julian wrote to Arsacius, the high priest of the province of Galatia. The emperor said he was pleased to see the worship of the gods so magnificently revived, but yet more could be done. Arsacius was invited to consider and attempt to imitate the practices which had made Christianity so successful, in particular Christian hospitality towards strangers, reverence for the dead and the pretended piety of Christian lives. Pagans too should practise works of charity. Provision should be made for the poor and hostels furnished in every city, so as to form a chain of confessional caravanserais.

Under the heading ‘transubstantiation’ in the Oxford dictionary of the Christian Church, one finds that the word was in widespread use in the later part of the 12th cent., and at the Lateran Council of 1215 belief in Transubstantiation was defined as de fide; but the elaboration of the doctrine was not achieved till after the acceptance of the Aristotelian metaphysics later in the 13th cent., when it found classic formulation in the teaching of St Thomas Aquinas.

It is surprising to find that Friends were included within the terms of the Toleration Act. The political situation they faced in 1689 was distinctly unpromising. They not only continued to experience the hostility and prejudice that they had suffered since their earliest days, but they were seriously compromised by the close identification of William Penn with the discredited Catholic policies of James II. An examination of the debates in parliament on the Toleration Bill reveals that Friends were by no means certain of being included in the act. Yet their acceptance of the terms they were offered is also surprising in view of their objection to any compromise with the state over matters of religious conscience, an objection which led to their refusal to seek licences under Charles II's Declaration of Indulgence in 1672. Moreover, a number of recent studies have identified the continued insistence of many provincial Friends, particularly in the rigorous heartland of Quakerism in the north–west, upon the strict maintenance of their testimonies, and indeed a redefining of those testimonies partly in response to the growing compromises with the state made by the Quaker leadership.

Historians of eighteenth–century England have begun to reassess its relationship with the preceding century, creating in the process the now conventional periodisation of a ‘long eighteenth century’ from c. 1660 to 1832. Historical revisionism, however, needs constantly to be revised, and there remains the danger of creating too sharp a separation between this period and that which preceded it. This article aims to introduce just such a complicating factor by linking the turbulent theologies of the 1640s and 1650s with a particular strand of eighteenth century religious thought. This might be described as the legacy of ultra-Protestantism, the insistence on the priority of private judgement and the supremacy of Scripture which were allied with a suspicion of clericalism. Its survival among an articulate and academically well-placed group of eighteenth-century Anglican divines demonstrates that the attempt by the Restoration Church of England to distance itself from ultra-Protestantism was not uniformly successful; the problem of ‘heresy’ continued into a period of Anglican history more usually associated with comfortable doctrinal latitude.

During the Great War, leaders in the two major Presbyterian Churches in Scotland – the established Church of Scotland and the United Free Church – struggled to provide moral and spiritual leadership to the Scottish people. As National Churches which together claimed the adherence of the large majority of the Scottish people, the two Churches were seen as responsible for interpreting the meaning of the war and defining war aims, as well as for offering consolation to the suffering and the bereaved. At the beginning of the war, leaders of the two Churches had been confident of their ability to fulfil these national responsibilities. Both Churches had experienced a flowering of theological and intellectual creativity during the forty years before the war, and their colleges and theologians had exercised profound influence on the Reformed tradition throughout the world. Both had been active in the ‘social gospel’ movement, with their leaders advancing bold criticisms of the social order. The two Churches, moreover, had been moving toward ecclesiastical union when the war began, a union which their leaders hoped would restore the spiritual and moral authority of the Church in a covenanted nation.

Marcel Bataillon is a notable instance of a scholar who found his line early and pursued it unremittingly. His Érasme et I'Espagne was published in 1937; a translation into Spanish appeared in 1950, with a second edition in 1966; but the original work has long been out of print and commonly unavailable. Thanks to Bataillon for ‘most important help’ were expressed in volume vii of P. S. Allen's Opus epistolarum Erasmi Roterodami, published in 1928, and again by Allen's widow in volume xi, published in 1947.