Religious, political, and economic forces have given direction to the stream of modern history. Though all these forces operate in every age, each has exercised the major influence for a definite period of the modern era. Religious forces were dominant in the sixteenth century. Then religious values were regarded as of primary concern. The great thinkers on political and economic subjects usually based their ideas on religious principles. The major wars were Wars of Religion.

Considerable mystery has long surrounded the antecedents of the Society of Friends. George Fox, an unlettered country lad, has been pictured as having gathered the Society after receiving, through a series of direct revelations, a full-blown message of redemption. Quaker historians have sought to confirm this portrayal by emphasizing that it was “in communion with his deepest self” that he made his “great spiritual discovery,” and that it came to him from no outward source. This explanation seemed rather naive to the more sophisticated mind of Rufus M. Jones, and he set himself to the task of uncovering the actual source from which Fox's religious thinking was derived. His two volumes—Studies in Mystical Religion and Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries —are sufficient testimony of the thoroughness and scholarship with which he tackled the problem. Nevertheless, after long and careful investigation, he felt obliged to confess that nothing more positive could be affirmed than that the possible influences in Fox's environment, for the most part, “worked upon him in subconscious ways, as an atmosphere and climate of his spirit, rather than a clearly conceived body of truth.” This conclusion was tenable so long as Fox was regarded as the founder of the Quakers. It now seems evident, however, by his own admissions, that he was not the founder but simply joined a sect already in existence. This fact necessitates an attempt to identify the group with which Fox became affiliated.

Those who had once experienced the power and blessedness of the Gospel as revealed by Luther felt that he had restored to them a lost treasure greater than all worldly riches. So it is in the work of Luther that we find the roots of Lutheran church music. The story of carrying over the old in music and tracing its influence in the new era is an unending maze of facts and conjectures, none the less interesting, however. This new church body would become distinctive in its music. It would substitute for the ritualistic and even pantomimical where every feature of the architecture, of the altar, and environment, as well as the liturgie services, symbolized religion, a new vitality, direct interest, and instructiveness. This would mean a breaking away from that form of church services where reverence is voiced by every appeal to eye and ear, where one would feel himself verily to be in the House of Prayer and before the throne of the Holy One.

From the middle of the seventeenth until the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century Marius Mercator was regarded by theologians and historians as one of the most valuable extant sources of information concerning both the Pelagian and Nestorian controversies. The basis of the notable reputation which he so long enjoyed was of course the erroneous belief that he was the compiler of the Palatine Collection, a vast and impressive mass of papal and episcopal letters, remonstrances, sermons, confessions of faith, and memoirs used in the two ecumenical councils of the fifth century. This material concerned, almost exclusively, the heresies of Pelagius and Nestorius and apparently had been gathered together for use against the adherents of those two heresiarchs. Though little could be learned about Mercator himself, the available information gave him an impeccable position in the ranks of the orthodox. He was a disciple and correspondent of Augustine, whom he supported by savage attacks on Pelagius and other leaders of the Western heresy, and he was also known to Jerome, who, in a letter sent from distant Palestine to the Roman Donatus in the year 419, included a message to Mercator, encouraging him in his opposition to the Pelagians.