“The story of the peopling of America has not yet been written. We do not understand ourselves,” complained Frederick Jackson Turner in 1891. Subsequent immigration history contributed to national self-understanding. Eighty years later historians have turned their attention to a second chapter in the halftold tale of the peopling of America. They have begun to concentrate on the story of the regrouping of citizens along racial, ethnic and religious lines, and of their relations to each other in movements of what have come to be called “peoplehood.”

The recent resurgence of scholarly interest in the Venetian Gasparo Contarini (1483–1542), stimulated in general by the growing interest in Italian religious history and in particular by the discovery of new material, has resulted in the partial emergence of the young patrician from the obscurity which has heretofore enveloped his early years. A succession of studies in the last decade or so have now enabled us to visualize the young Contarini more clearly and have given firmer substance to a once shadowy figure. Viewing his early life from the vantage point of different interests, a number of scholars in various countries have placed Contarini more intelligibly within his milieu, illuminating not merely the individual himself but also the group with which he was associated and the institutions within which he grew to manhood.

When the citizens of seventeenth-century Leiden spoke of “the English church here,” they referred in most cases to the English Reformed Church, not to the historically-famous church of the Pilgrim Fathers. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the Dutch city of Leiden included a sizable English and Scottish community, but one divided into two distinct religious factions, namely the Separatist Pilgrims and the non-separating Reformed Church. The enthusiasm to celebrate the deeds of the Mayflower Pilgrims may obscure Leiden's larger community of British strangers and sojourners; and not Leiden alone, for the English churches of Leiden were but two of more than two dozen such churches in early seventeenth-century Netherlands. John Robinson and his congregation arrived at Leiden in 1609, two years after the older English-Scottish community of the city had begun its own church life.

Charles Hector de St. Georges, Marquis de Marsay (1688–1753), lived for the greater part of his life in the small and obscure principality of Wittgenstein in the upper Eder valley between the Rhineland and Hesse-Kassel. In his earlier years he was a disciple of the Flemish mystic, Antoinette Bourignon, and later came under the influence of the works of Madame Guyon. In Wittgenstein he attempted to put their teachings into practice by following an ascetic pattern of life. He attracted a number of followers, not only from the sectarian groups which had taken refuge in Wittgenstein, but also farther afield, notably in Switzerland, which he visited on a number of occasions. The fact that he was known in Britain to John Wesley and William Law, as well as by the group of mystically inclined gentry in north-east Scotland, is an indication of the contacts that existed between pietistic groups in different parts of Europe. The details of Marsay's life are not without interest is a considered attempt to practice the quietist spirituality of Madame Guyon in a Protestant context.

English Roman Catholic reactions to the issues presented by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) were as varied as the elements which made up the English Catholic community itself. Any reading of the Catholic periodical press in England during the years immediately after Darwin's epochal publication will bear this out. These reactions ranged from a simple reaffirmation of childhood formulations of the account of creation in “Genesis,” to rather disingenuous allegorical reinterpretations of the meaning of what “Moses”—and Darwin—had said.

Every one who have ever been comforted by hearing the words “By this authority I absolve thee” spoken by one of our priests after a penitent confession, is indebted to Oliver Sherman Prescott; and might give thanks to God that he lived and fought in courts ecclesiastical in these United States of America.