Sermons preached by clerics have been largely neglected by scholars as a resource for the study of the history of English ecclesiastical law since the Reformation. Needless to say, scholarship has focused on the substantive and procedural ecclesiastical law found in the ecclesiastical legislation of Parliament, the canons passed by the convocations, the case law of the spiritual and temporal courts and the treatises of the civilian commentators. However, some historians of early modern England have studied the sermons delivered at the Inns of Court; but these studies have little to say about their preachers’ portrayal of the ecclesiastical law and its jurisprudence. 1 Nevertheless, as we shall demonstrate, in each century since the Reformation, clergy in their preaching commonly treated legal matters or else used legal materials, including ecclesiastical law. The eighteenth century is no exception – and Thomas Sherlock (1678–1761) is an excellent example, whose function included as Master of the Temple (1704–1753) preaching to the common lawyers of Inner and Middle Temple. What follows deals with his life and career, law in his sermons (including jurisprudential concepts common to both the temporal and the spiritual law), and his legal thought in wider context – all at a time when the law was an inescapable part of the religious landscape, the limits on toleration, the constraints on Roman Catholics, and the provision for occasional conformity. 2

Abstract Juridical ecumenism is a branch of ecclesionomology: the study of church law as a form of applied ecclesiology. It involves the comparative study of the laws and other regulatory entities of different ecclesial traditions and their institutional churches, as well as the practice of church law and ecumenism. It does not seek to replace the historic focus on theology and doctrine in ecumenical dialogue, but rather to remedy the missing legal link in the ecumenical enterprise to date, by using church laws as a rich unifying instrument for greater visible communion between separated institutional churches. One fruit of juridical ecumenism is the issue of the Statement of Principles of Christian Law by an Ecumenical Panel in 2016 and its launch at the 11th Assembly of the World Council of Churches in 2022. Marking the 1700th anniversary of the great Council of Nicaea and its Canons gives us the opportunity to think critically, as an exercise in juridical ecumenism, about continuity and change over the centuries in the nature of church law. We can achieve this by comparing the Statement of Principles of Chistian Law (2016) issued by the Ecumenical Christian Law Panel with the Nicene Canons (325) issued by the first Ecumenical Council. This article explores the similarities and differences between these two juridical entities – in terms of their (1) nature, authority, and reception; (2) subject matter; (3) sources; (4) purposes; and (5) internal structure – and what the Nicene Canons and the Christian Law Principles tell us about these five aspects of church law itself. I conclude with reflections on the value of comparison for the future of juridical ecumenism.

Abstract This article examines the origin of and controversies surrounding the Nicene Creed and discusses its limitations as a statement of faith. It points out, for example, that the Creed fails to affirm either the unity of the three persons in one God or even the divinity or personhood of the Spirit. It neither affirms the creation of the world from nothing nor denies that the Son is a creature. The article then seeks to answer the following three questions: (1) why is the Creed so indecisive even on points that were under debate at the Council of Nicaea?; (2) if there was so little that could be defined, what did those who promulgated the Creed hope to accomplish?; and finally (3) where should we look for a trustworthy statement of the ecumenical teaching of the Church on creation, the Trinity and the mission of the Son?