During the past decade, interest has been steadily growing in Nicholas of Cusa, but recent research has been more devoted to his ideas than to his life. As a mature and very successful man, he displayed a curious mixture of ability and obtuseness, utter and selfless devotion to the highest ideals and extreme pettiness. This paper will deal with his period as Bishop of Brixen, from his arrival in the diocese in 1452 to his departure in 1460. It was an episcopate undertaken with high hopes of far-reaching church reform, and almost everything in it went wrong. I shall try to show just what it was that went awry.

In the middle of May, 1527, a religious debate took place at the castle of the manorial Lords of Liechtenstein at Nicolsburg, Moravia, which aroused widest attention and strong passions. On the one side was Dr. Baithasar Hubmaier, highly respected by the Lords of Liechtenstein and by a large section of the city of Nicolsburg which Hubmaier not so long ago had congregated into a peculiar Anabaptist (mass-) church of his own creation. He was supported by his fellow believers Martin Göschl, formerly auxiliary bishop in Moravia, and Hans Spittlemayer, previously Catholic clergyman but now a coworker with Hubmaier.On the other side of the debate was Hans Hut, the outstanding Anabaptist missioner-apostle of South Germany and Austria, his friends and fellow-believers Oswald Glaidt, Hans Nadler, and several more, all of whom disagreed strongly with the way Hubmaier had guided the “radical reformation” in the city of Nicolsburg. We do not know exactly the topic of this debate and most likely will never know it with certainty. The Chronicle of the Hutterian Brethren claims that the topic had been the issue of the “sword,” that is, the question whether or not a Christian may serve as a soldier or as a civic magistrate who, too, is bound to use the “sword” to enforce law and order. It is said that Hubmaier defended the sword even for “radical” Christians while Hut was passionately opposed to it.

Baptist historians have frequently asserted that the first Calvinistic Baptist Association in New England was the Warren Baptist Association founded under the aegis of James Manning in 1767. Most historians are aware that an earlier association, founded in the 1690's, existed among the Six Principle General or Arminian Baptists in New England, but with the great Calvinistic reorientation in the Baptist movement following the Great Awakening this association ceased to be of any significance outside Rhode Island. Little notice has been taken, however, of the Six Pinciple Calvinistic Baptist Association which developed on the borders of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island in the 1750's to unite and serve a group of Separate-Baptist churches formed in the aftermath of the Awakening. And yet this association, short-lived though it was, merits attention. It represented the first spontaneous effort of the Separate- Baptists to seek unity and order in the confusion which followed the break-up of the Separate movement after 1754. Although it proved to be a false start, it nevertheless prepared the way for the Warren Association whose importance is acknowledged by all Baptist historians. And it is particularly interesting that the basis of the organization was agreement on the belief that the ritual of laying on of hands was essential to church membership.

With the convening and accomplishments of the Second Vatican Council liberal Catholicism seems triumphant in the Catholic Church. Despite continuing controversy over such agonizing problems as birth control, it would appear that the Church has forthrightly and definitely decided to reconcile itself as fully as possible to modern society. From this present perspective, the historian may well need to reexamine certain aspects of the rise of liberal Catholicism and to reassess the work of certain of its pioneers and the frustrating obstacles they encountered. No longer on the defensive, the partisans of liberal Catholicism may want to reclaim those they have ignored or rejected. One curious figure who seldom if ever has been given credit for his role in the emergence of liberal Catholicism is the Abbé Henri Grégoire, priest and politician during the French Revolution and patriarch of the schismatic Constitutional Church.Liberal Catholic historians have tended to shy away from too much attention to this puzzling and perhaps embarrassing figure, leaving him to the attacks of conservative Catholics or the enthusiastic devotion of neo-Jansenist sectarians. Secular liberals who have generally preferred to face a Catholic Church which was unequivocally reactionary have pretended to see Grégoire as an excentric of little significance.

American influences on Canadian Protestant Churches before Confederation do not present any simple historical pattern. As any student of Canadian history would expect the responses of the Canadian Protestant denominations vary widely, not only from one denomination to another but from one region to another. Indeed, regionalism seems to be the most important factor in determining the degree of American influences, both positive and negative, on Canadian Protestantism. Canadian historians have examined or at least noted separate aspects of American influences, particularly in a denominational context, but no one has apparently attempted a survey approach to the wide range of such influences—wide both geographically and topically.

While it is true that the social gospel of Walter Rauschenbusch is more than the religious strain of the progressive movement, there is no doubt that he sought a christianized social order, one in “harmony with the ethical convictions which we identify with Christ.” And he was much concerned with the Kingdom of God, the “growing perfection in the collective life of humanity, in our laws, in the customs of society, in the institutions for education, and of the administration of mercy.”