The Council of Basle was officially charged with three basic concerns: the reform of the Church in head and members; the extirpation of heresy, particularly Bohemian Hussitism; and the attainment of peace among Christian Princes. Yet, the Council was most absorbed by, and is most remembered for, a fourth, unscheduled concern. From its outset, the prime determinant of the actions and decisions of the Council proved to be the problem of living and working with the Papacy. In retrospect it is easy to see that this problem was insoluble. One could not expect the efficient functioning of the Church if there was doubt or confusion about the will of God, and the presence of such doubt and confusion was certain so long as even two agencies could gain support for their contentions that they were directly recipient to the Holy Spirit. Singularity of headship was absolutely necessary to the orderly processes of the Church. Yet the contradiction of this essential singularity was implicit at Constance in the accommodation, by one another of the curialists, the protagonists of an absolute, papal monarchy, and the conciliarists, who sought divine guidance through periodic General Councils. This accommodation, in turn, was necessary if the doubt and confusion engendered by the Great Schism was to be resolved. At Basle, this contradiction was wrought into a conflict which attracted a variety of opportunists who could further their ancillary or extraneous ends through a posture of service to one side or the other, and in so doing they obfuscated the issues and prolonged the struggle.

“Indeed to lay in a state of ancient knowledge the studious master must go straight to the Greeks: to Aristotle, Theophrastus, Plotinus: to Origen, Chrysostom, Basil. Of the Latin Fathers, Ambrose will be found the most fertile in classical allusions: Jerome has the greatest command of the Scriptures.” Thus does Erasmus assess the Fathers in 1514, in the second edition of De Ratione Studii. They are a group of ancient writers coming within the horizon of those who enthusiastically “searched out, read and discovered the Greek and Roman literary classics in the two centuries between the death of Dante and the death of Machiavelli.”

The apt phrase, “a nation with the soul of a church” was coined by G. K. Chesterton in answer to his question, “What Is America?” the title of the autobiographical essay in which he relates how he came to appreciate what the United States was all about. Being irked, and then amused by the kinds of questions asked him when he applied for entrance into the United States, he was led to ask what is it that “makes America peculiar?” He concluded that it was the fact that

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in The Declaration of Independence… It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, and that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism, and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived.

Puritan authors as a class are not noted for their economy with words, and in this respect Samuel Willard is no exception. His “works” consist of somewhat more than 6,000 pages of exegetic sermons, catechetic lectures, hermeneutic discourses, and polemic tracts on scriptural topics. He published nothing of a speculative nature, and his expression of church doctrine is—throughout—such as Calvin and his English and American posterity would approve.

In the American self-consciousness from its beginning to the present there has existed a firm conviction that this nation is destined, either by divine decree or circumstances, for a unique place among the peoples of the earth. One form of this is the assumption that the United States will provide the great example which others will want to follow. The classic expression of this was given by John Winthrop aboard the Arbella, but equally valid ones can be found in the words of modern Americans. Winthrop said:

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when he shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations ‘The Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.

Students of American historiography value the latter part of the nineteenth century as a period in which distinctive ideas about the nature and procedures of historical research became explicit. More specifically, it was an era when the scholarly world was greatly influenced by the ideal of scientific objectivity and exactitude. Rapid advances in scientific theory and practical application in the post-war industrial boom set a standard for reliable knowledge in all fields. In that general enthusiasm for scientific precision several practicing historians tried to align their craft with the dominant criteria of their day in hopes of winning added respect and integrity for historical writing. The acceptance of that standard in the realm of historio-graphical theory produced significant repercussions in current ideas about church history, an area which until that time had been considered a separate field of inquiry. The decades between 1884 and 1896 mark a watershed in American thought, a transition from historical sensitivity at once patriotic and hagiographical to a discipline self-consciously, perhaps naively, tied to documentary evidence. But, beyond the popular rubric of faithfulness to the written record, there was a great debate over both the possible interpretations allowed by accumulated data and the final purpose of historical information. Such questions were especially relevant to church historians because they often answered the latter query before the former. The conflicting opinions, articulated by a fresh generation of European-trained scholars, broached questions about the historian's task that continue to be pertinent today. Contemporaneous problems besetting all historians came into open conflict in this earlier period, and serious dilemmas still confront us.