Among the Puritan ‘martyrs’ celebrated by Samuel Clarke and Daniel Neal, few have been more frequently mentioned and less carefully considered than Richard Sibbes (1577–1635). Sibbes, primarily remembered as Preacher of Gray's Inn and author of The Bruised Reede, has been presented as one of a number of early Stuart preachers who neither approved nor practised bending the knee in communion, nor wearing the surplice, nor signing the cross in baptism, and yet who somehow remained within the Established Church. He was, it is reported, constantly troubled by Laud. Doubly deprived, censured and silenced, Sibbes became a model for his numerous disciples – among them Thomas Goodwin, John Davenport, John Cotton – who would later find their way into dissent. It is supposed that only the power of his lawyer-friends and noble patrons allowed him to retain his ministry at Gray's Inn for almost two decades. After his death, his writings became almost entirely the possession of Nonconformists and Sibbes came to be read through separatist spectacles. And yet, although remembered as espousing a robustly reformed theology, his moderation was particularly admired by those who followed him. Sibbes seemed to stand above the tumult of the times, ‘to preserve the vitals and essentials of religion, that the souls of his hearers, being captivated with the inward beauty and glory of Christ, and being led into an experimental knowledge of heavenly truths, theirspirits might not evaporate and discharge themselves in endless, gainless, soul-unedifying, and conscience-perplexing questions’.

This article examines the role, in patristic and medieval commentaries on Isaiah in the west up until 1150, of the theme of the ‘remnant’ (Isaiah i.9; x.22), which is related to Jewish Christians by St Paul. Assumed to signify the small number of Jewish converts in Apostolic times, it could also be used on the one hand to minimise the Jewish contribution to the early Church (St Jerome and Rupert of Deutz) and on the other hand to emphasise it (Haimo of Auxerre, Bruno of Segni and Herveus of Bourg-Dieu). Some authors, however, simply ignore the question (Arnold of Bonneval and Rainald of St Eloi).

It has often been noted that St. Stephen stands, at first sight, as an isolated figure in the history of the early Church. His theological thought, as expressed in his speech (Acts vii), is very personal and, if compared with other forms of primitive Christian thought, almost completely aberrant. Its main characteristic is a strongly antiritualistic trend, and a fierce hostility towards the Temple, which he obviously considers almost as a place of idolatry. The building up of the Temple by Solomon seems in his eyes to stand on the same plane as the making of the Golden Calf. It is the last of those many and grievous sins and apostasies which mark the whole course of Israelite history. He thus clearly demonstrates that the accusations produced against him by so-called ‘false witnesses’, and which motivated his trial, were perfectly well founded: lie had indeed spoken ‘blasphemous words against this holy place’ and, ipso facto, against at least part of the Law.

The history of the Established Church from the 1740s to the 1830s is viewed as a period of inertia and complacency. Failure to respond to the exigencies of the economic and demographic revolutions resulted in the increasing weakness of the National Church when compared with extra-establishment religion. In the face of increasing pastoral responsibilities, the Church was slow to augment its existing accommodation, or to respond to the challenge of modifying the ancient parochial structure in the face of patron and incumbent interest, and increasing Nonconformist hostility. The resulting decline of the Church from its near monopoly position in 1800, to that of a minority Establishment by 1851, is well documented. Yet while the general pattern of Church extension is known, there have been few studies of the Anglican decline at the diocesan level. Of the twenty-seven dioceses in existence in 1800 one is of particular importance – the diocese of Durham, ‘where the Church was endowed with a splendour and a power unknown in monkish times and in Popish countries’. Here the Church possessed its greatest concentration of resources; here also it was to suffer its greatest reverses.

A round 960 king Harald Bluetooth ‘made the Danes Christians’. But for another hundred years outsiders would have found the Danish Church provincial and backward. Until the end of the eleventh century Denmark had no cathedral schools and few of its native clergy were learned men. There were no influential monasteries until 1089 and, therefore, no party in the Church to counteract the influence of the married clergy and champion the ideas of reform favoured by the Roman Curia. It was not until 1054 that king Sven Estridsøn divided his kingdom into nine bishoprics and the ecclesiastical map of the kingdom began to assume its medieval shape. It took even longer for these bishoprics to acquire adequate endowments. The churches of Denmark were so poor that simony was often a necessity. Finally, Denmark had no metropolitan authority of its own until the beginning of the twelfth century. Throughout the eleventh century its bishops owed obedience to the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen and the efforts of Sven Estridsøn to establish a native archbishopric were unsuccessful.

The lurches from Catholicism to Protestantism and back which occurred in the reigns of Henry VIII, his son and two daughters produced dramatic changes in the liturgies, decorative fittings, and even, on occasions, the architecture of the country's cathedrals. Yet, despite these changes, there was a real sense in which cathedrals were at the eye of the confessional storms which raged about them. It is true that, as part of the Henrician reform process, the monastic corporations at Carlisle, Durham, Peterborough, Ely, Norwich, Canterbury, Rochester, Osney, Winchester, Westminster, Gloucester, Worcester and Bristol had been first dissolved and then refounded as ‘cathedrals of the new foundation’, the monks replaced by minor canons and prebendaries. Once this upheaval was over, however, the new foundation cathedrals underwent little further institutional change. Those cathedrals which had been staffed by secular priests before the Reformation (known as cathedrals of the old foundation), moreover, survived almost wholly untouched. In both new and old foundations, the same administrative and financial structures continued to support dignitaries and liturgical officers whose only obvious function remained the celebration of liturgy, despite the rejection of opus Dei and its accompanying theology of good works.

The later 1550s in Sprain are remembered as the time of the discovery of ‘Lutheran’ groups in Valladolid and Seville and the ensuing reaction of the authorities: the autos de fe, as the Fernando de Valdés's Index librorum prohibitorum, the edict ordering all Spaniards (with few exceptions) studying or teaching abroad to return to Spain within four months. ‘Heresy’ was to be eradicated at home and Spain was to be preserved from contagion from beyond her frontiers. There was, however, a further subordinate aim: to capture and bring back to Spain those Spaniards who for reasons of religion had taken refuge in Northern Europe. When a dozen Hieronymite monks from San Isidro at Seville fled their monastery and their country in the late summer of 1557, one finds the Inquisitor General, in November of that year, sending a list of their names to the king in the Netherlands. Further lists of wanted heretics continued to be forwarded there when Philip had returned to Spain. Cardinal Granvelle, in a letter to the king of 18 October 1561, refers to ‘aquella escriptura que V. M. me embió venida de los inquisidores de Sevilla’. At the start of that year he had similarly referred to ‘un escripto venido de los inquisidores de Sevilla’ which the king had recently sent. In April 1562 the Margrave of Antwerp was replying to inquiries from Granvelle concerning persons named in the trials of Julian Hernandez (caught when in Seville, distributing Protestant literature, in 1557) and Fray Domingo de Guzmán.

T. W. Manson posed the following problem:

…quotations are absent in those places where we should most confidently look lor them it the Fourth Gospel was composed in Ephesus about A.D, 100 by John the Apostle. No theory about the Gospel that fails to give an explanation of the phenomenon presented by the writings of Ignatius, Polycarp and Justin has much chance of survival.

No information about the Fourth Gospel or its author appears in the Pastoral Epistles.