The terms “Reformation” and “Renaissance” have acquired such currency that they have come to be accepted as denoting what really and truly happened, and in fact, the words themselves are regarded as the guarantee of the actuality of the phenomena they merely have been coined to describe. The matter of defining accurately and precisely the meaning of both the Reformation and the Renaissance has occasioned so large and disputatious a body of scholarship that it is with some trepidation that I add another, question to an already sufficiently vexing problem. For not only must the meaning of the Reformation and the Renaissance be defined in themselves but the relationship between them must be clearly stated as well. The fact of the matter is that the relationship between the two has an existence and nature as real and as significant as they have in themselves, for since the one without the other is impossible of full definition, what then is the exact relationship between them? What are the origins of this relationship and how did it develop and come to be regarded? I have tried to answer these questions in this paper; to simplify the story somewhat I have confined the study to English materials.

Augustine lived at a critical moment in western European history. On the last day of the year 406, many Vandals, Alani, Suevi crossed the Rhine and, having defeated the Franks, settled for a time in Gaul and finally reached the Pyrenees. Four years later Rome itself fell to Alaric and his Visigoths. In addition to these outward catastrophes, the church's inner life suffered from the assaults of heretic and schismatic. Arianism persisted in Gaul, Montanism and Manichaeism were rife in North Africa. Puritanic Donatism laid claim to being genuine Christianity, a claim which the doughty Bishop of Hippo could not countenance.

So distinctive is revivalism of American religion that for “almost two hundred years it is revivalism more than any other phenomenon that has supplied the land-marks in our religious history …. It would not be difficult and by no means unsatisfactory to write the history of American Protestantism from the standpoint of its periodic awakenings.”