Augustine said that Rome fell frequently, all too often into “utter moral depravity,” occasionally into the hands of the city's enemies. Maybe Aeneas was to blame. He had shown poor judgment, hauling to Italy the gods that failed to save Troy. Subsequently, when the Gauls came to Rome's gates, those divine and purportedly vigilant protectors did remarkably little protecting. They later offered no resistance when Nero reduced Rome to rubble. Augustine held Aeneas's humiliations all the more demoralizing; Virgil misled citizens, suggesting that Rome would stand forever. Christians should have known better. They had it on higher authority that heaven and earth would pass away.

Three major Protestant missionary organizations—the Company for the ropagation of the Gospel in New England (the NEC, founded 1649), the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG, founded 1701), and the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge (SSPCK, founded 1709)—all played significant roles in Christianizing and civilizing the inhabitants of British North America. The New England Company had the longest history and is the oldest Protestant missionary organization. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts sent no fewer than three hundred missionaries to America between 1701 and 1783. While the NEC and the SPG have received scholarly attention, the Society in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge has been virtually ignored.

Gilbert Tennent (1703–1764), an “Ulster Scot” born the same year as John Wesley, is usually remembered as a leader of revivals during the “Great Awakening” in the middle-colonies. John Witherspoon (1723–1794), a “champion of orthodoxy” from Edinburgh called to be the President of the College of New Jersey, is usually treated as a “founding father” of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. However, many events leading up to the first General Assembly in 1788 reflect the influence of Gilbert Tennet, the moderator of the newly re-united Synods of Philadelphia and New York in 1758.

The intellectual crisis of Victorian faith was a tale of two books. Charles Darwin's Origin of Species was published on 28 November, 1859; a composite volume of biblical criticism, Essays and Reviews, six of whose seven authors were clergymen, appeared on 21 March 1860. Both volumes provoked controversies. The Darwinian controversy is remembered and the biblicalcontroversy is largely forgotten, and perhaps in the longue durŕe of history this ought to be so. But there was no doubt at the time that the biblical controversy was more important, dealing with matters that Victorians regarded as both fundamental and familiar. Richard Church, later dean of St. Paul's, wrote to his American scientist friend Asa Gray in 1861 that Darwin's “book I have no doubt would be the subject still of a great row, if there were not a much greater row going on about Essays and Reviews.” Leslie Stephen, who experienced both controversies as a young man, later regretted that “the controversy raised by Essays and Reviews even distracted men for a time from the far more important issues raised by the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.” A modern student of press reactions to Darwin found that Essays and Reviews received quantitatively more attention and concluded: “Darwin's book received decidedly less immediate attention in the press than the theological Essays and Reviews … [T]here is little doubt that science was no match for religion in the competition for public interest in Mid-Victorian Britain.” Had Essays and Reviews been published when first advertised in February 1859, or even when rescheduled in October, it, rather than the Origin of Species, would have been the major book of that critical year.

In 1890 the Boston Herald carried the following review of an article entitled “Thoughts for the Times or The New Theology”: “A curiosity is a paper by a native African, Orishatukeh Faduma, on ‘Thoughts for the Times,’ by which he means the new theology. This is the first time that a criticof the new theology has turned up from the dark continent, and is a curious and significant paper. When a native can write like this on subjects in which he has been obliged to educate himself, it means that we are to say nothing more against the intelligence of the African race.” While correct in noting the historical significance of Faduma's efforts, the reviewer's condescension disclosed his failure to appreciate and understand the sophistication and depth of Faduma' theological analysis and agenda. Faduma's critique of elements of the New Theology did not entail his rejection of this controversial theological synthesis which emerged during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Rather, his comments on religion and science, the historicalcritical method, comparative religion, missiology, the historical development of Christianity, and Christian ethics reveal that he essentially shared the theological orientation of its formulators.