This thesis demonstrates the importance of scholastic philosophy and natural law to the theory of religious uniformity and toleration in Seventeenth-Century England. Some of the most influential apologetic tracts produced by the Church of England, including Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Robert Sanderson's Ten lectures on humane conscience and Samuel Parker A discourse of ecclesiastical politie are examined and are shown to belong to a common Anglican tradition which emphasized aspects of scholastic natural law theory in order to refute pleas for ceremonial diversity and liberty of conscience. The relationship of these ideas to those of Hobbes and Locke are also explored. Studies of Seventeenth-Century ideas about conformity and toleration have often stressed the reverence people showed the individual conscience, and the weight they attributed to the examples of the magistrates of Israel and Judah. Yet arguments for and against uniformity and toleration might instead resolve themselves into disputes about the role of natural law within society, or the power of human laws over the conscience. In this the debate about religious uniformity could acquire a very philosophical and sometimes theological tone. Important but technical questions about moral obligation, metaphysics and theology are demonstrated to have played an important role in shaping perceptions of magisterial power over religion. These ideas are traced back to their roots in scholastic philosophy and the Summa of Aquinas. Scholastic theories about conscience, law, the virtues, human action and the distinction between nature and grace are shown to have animated certain of the Church's more influential apologists and their dissenting opponents. The kind of discourse surrounding toleration and liberty of conscience is thus shown to be very different than sometimes supposed. Perceptions of civil and ecclesiastical power were governed by a set of ideas and concerns that have hitherto not featured prominently in the literature about the development of religious toleration.

This thesis examines the impact in mid- to later-seventeenth century England of the major contemporary religious controversy in France. The debates associated with this controversy, which revolved around the formal condemnation of a heresy popularly called Jansenism, involved fundamental questions about the doctrine of grace and moral theology, about the life of the Church and the conduct of individual Christians. In providing an analysis of the main themes of the controversy, and an account of instances of English interest, the thesis argues that English Protestant theologians in the process of working out their own views on basic theological questions recognised the relevance of the continental debates. It is further suggested that the theological arguments evolved by the French writers possess some value as a point of comparison for the developing views of English theologians. Where the Jansenists reasserted an Augustinian emphasis on the gratuity of salvation against Catholic theologians who over-valued the powers of human nature, the Anglican writers examined here, arguing against Protestant theologians who denied nature any moral potency, emphasised man's contribution to his own salvation. Both arguments have been seen to contain a corrosive individualism, the former through its preoccupation with the luminous experience of grace, the latter through its tendency to elide grace and moral virtue, and reduce Christianity to the voluntary ethical choices of individuals. These assessments, it is argued here, misrepresent the theologians in question. Nevertheless, their thought did encourage greater individualism and moral autonomy. For both groups, their opponents' theological premises were deficient to the extent that they vitiated morality; and in both cases their responses, centring on the transformation of the inner man by love, privileged the moral responsibility of the individual. Their moral 'rigorism', it is suggested, focusing on the affective experience of conversion, represented in both cases an attempt to provide a sound empirical basis for Christian faith and practice in the fragmented intellectual context of post-reformation Europe.

Religion and history became closely related in new ways in the Victorian imagination. This thesis asks why this was so, by focusing on arguments within British Protestant culture over progress and development in the history of Christianity. In an intellectual movement approximately beginning with the 1845 publication of John Henry Newman's 'Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine', and powerfully spreading and developing until the earlier years of the twentieth century, British intellectuals came to treat the history of religion - both as a past and present process, and as a didactic genre - as a vital element of broader attempts to stabilise or reconstruct religious belief and social order. Religious revivalists, determined to use church history as a raw material for the inculcation of exclusive confessional identities and dogmatic theology, were highly successful in pressing it on the attention of early Victorian audiences. But they proved unable to control its meaning. Historians rose to prominence who instead interpreted the history of Christianity as a guide to how religious culture, which many treated as indistinguishable from society as a whole, might eventually supersede denominational and dogmatic divisions. Humanity's spiritual development in time, which numerous British critics assessed with the aid of German Idealist thought, also became an attractive apologetic resource as the epistemological basis of Christian belief came under unprecedented public challenge. A major part of that danger was perceived to come from rival, avowedly secularising interpretations of human social progress. Such accounts - the ancestors of twentieth-century secularisation theory - were vigorously opposed by historians who understood modernity as involving not the decline, but the purification of Christianity. By exploring the ways in which Victorian critics - clerical and lay, religious and secular - approached religious history as a resource for solving the problems of their own age, this thesis offers a new way of understanding the importance of history, claims to knowledge, and the nature and ends of 'liberalism' in the long nineteenth century.

The thesis deals with Britain's early Cold War history and the political history of the Church of England. It mainly uses primary sources, and contributes to our growing understanding of the early Cold War, especially in its cultural/religious elements. It explores how the Church of England dealt with the development of the early Cold War in Britain. It argues that in order to understand better the Church of England's role, an account of its perspective on issues of state modernisation dating back to at least the 1930s is necessary. It was then, during a decade of authoritarianism, and especially at the Oxford Conference of 1937, that the Church' standpoint towards secularisation was established, while the transnational agenda of the ecumenical movement was also adopted and internalized by Church of England. The thesis also examines the agencies which it built and worked with: in particular the British Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches. As the Church is the Established Church, its relationship with specific government agencies, especially the British Foreign Office and the Ministry of Information also became increasingly important. The thesis reveals the Church of England's lack of autonomy in time of crisis and the importance of key individuals for the institutional leadership of the Church. Its ecumenical agenda had played an important role, but this was under pressure after the War, as a Europe-wide Christian community was increasingly challenged by 'Western Union' plans for a Cold War Western, Christian community and bloc. By 1948 the Church had been enrolled in the Cold War between East and West which was apparent in its alignment with British government policies and its withdrawn role in the ecumenical community. The thesis adds to our understanding of the Church of England's relationship to the state in these years, and contributes to the cultural dimension of the early Cold War in Britain.

Following the Evangelical Awakening, many of the Nonconformist traditions experienced an evolution in their ecclesiastical structure, resulting in the formation of new associations that frequently acted to establish pragmatic agencies like missionary societies, educational boards and social charities. The transition required new expressions of authority. Understanding the nature of this authority is the chief objective of this study. Chapter One introduces the various themes and goals of the study. Chapter Two explores the Hampshire Congregational Union. In addition to the Union’s structure, David Bogue and the Gosport Academy were central to this group’s identity. Chapter Three focuses on the Lancashire Congregational Union in the North West of England, home to William Roby, the central figure within Lancashire Congregationalism. Chapter Four covers the Lancashire and Yorkshire Baptist Association and the later Lancashire and Cheshire Baptist Association, where John Fawcett was the primary influence. The New Connexion of General Baptists, Chapter Five, was under the authoritative direction of Dan Taylor, a former Methodist and a zealous evangelist. Chapter Six analyses the Scotch Baptists. Peculiar among Baptists, it was created under the leadership of Archibald McLean. The British Churches of Christ, Chapter Seven, closely resembled the Scotch Baptists but were different in some fundamental ways. Finally, in Chapter Eight, patterns of associational authority among these associations will be compared and assessed. Authority among Nonconformist associations, particularly those denominations practising congregational polity, was exercised on the grounds of doctrinal purity and evangelistic expansion. As the nineteenth century continued, the organisational structures grew more complex. In turn, increased control was voluntarily granted to the organisations’ governing bodies so they might more efficiently minister. Following the Awakening, these voluntary bodies found new life as a pragmatic expression of Evangelical zeal.

The subject of this thesis is Jewish conversion to Christianity in medieval England. The majority of the material covered dates between 1066 and c.1290. The overall argument of the thesis contends that converts to Christianity in England remained essentially Jews. Following a discussion of the relevant secondary literature, which examines the existing discussion of converts and conversion, the principal arguments contained in the chapters of the thesis include the assertion that the increasing restrictiveness of the laws and rules regulating the Jewish community in England created a push factor towards conversion, and that converts to Christianity inhabited a legal grey area, neither under the jurisdiction of the Exchequer of the Jews, nor completely outside of it. Numerous questions are asked (and answered) about the variety of convert experience, in order to argue that there was a distinction between leaving Judaism and joining Christianity. Two convert biographies are presented. The first shows how the liminality that was a part of the conversion process affected the post-conversion life of a convert, and the second shows how a convert might successfully integrate into Christian society. The analysis of converts and conversion focusses on answering a number of questions. These relate to, among other things, pre-conversion relationships with royal family members, the reaction to corrody requests for converts, motives for conversion, forced or coerced conversions, the idea that a convert could be neither Christian nor Jew, converts re-joining Judaism, converts who carried the names of royal functionaries, the domus conversorum, convert instruction, and converting minors. The appendix to the thesis contains a complete catalogue of Jewish converts in medieval England. Among other things noted therein are inter-convert relationships, and extant source material. Each convert also has a biography.