When the church in England was reorganized in the reign of Henry VIII the canon law immediately became one of the major concerns of both the monarch and the bishops since it lay at the very foundation of the nature and structure of the church. From the earliest centuries England had participated in the full life of the church and there was no intention now to separate itself from that heritage. English bishops had participated in the conciliar procedures of the church as early as 314 at the Synod of Arles; other early synods were convened in England and the canon law of the church was known and observed there.

In the article by Sydney E. Ahlstrom on “Thomas Hooker—Puritanism and Democratic Citizenship” in the December, 1963, issue of Church History (XXXII, 4, p. 418) an alteration on the proofs did not make the printer's deadline due to a postal delay. In the interests of precision, the characterization of Edmund S. Morgan's The Puritan Dilemma had been revised to read as follows:

…he counteracts the interpretation of T. J. Wertenbaker and J. T. Adams by accenting the extension of political rights and the limitation of clerical authority in the Bay Colony. Compared to Winthrop's moderation, he finds the ‘belligerent precisionism’ of Thomas Dudley and Roger Williams impractical and ineffective.

Mr. Morgan does say that Winthrop “extended political rights to a larger proportion of the people than enjoyed such rights in England” (p. 92) and that “of all the governments in the Western world at that time, that of early Massachusetts gave the clergy least authority” (p. 96), but not explicitly—as I may have implied—that the Bay Colony was “the most liberal government then existing in the world.”

In the post-Reformation period one of the most significant developments concerns the understanding of the nature of theology and its relation to church and university. This development, which was related to a dual definition of theology and to a new distinction between the realms of reason and faith, began with Luther and Melanchthon and attained a preliminary crystallization with John Gerhard of the University of Jena, who was one of the chief representatives of seventeenth-century Protestant scholasticism. In this paper I wish to trace that development, which has failed to receive its due attention in accounts of Protestant theological history.

The purpose of this paper is to establish a more consistent estimate of John Canne within the context of English Puritanism, 1630–1660. A further conclusion, however, is that study of a figure like Canne makes evident the need to interpret his Puritan context in new ways. This reconsideration involves at once a critical attitude toward the exaggerated emphasis on parties in the analysis of Stuart Puritanism and also an appreciation of the apocalyptic exegesis of scripture which was common in that era and which frequently issued in Millenarianism. It is beyond the scope of this paper to implement these observations but it will be argued that such an effort is required insofar as John Canne has representative significance.

In 1848 Horace Bushnell delivered a lecture at Yale College entitled “The Divinity of Christ,” in which he set forth, for the first time, his views on the doctrine of the Trinity. A year later, this lecture and two others (“The Atonement” and “Dogma and Spirit”) appeared in a book entitled God in Christ. The book was prefaced with a preliminary dissertation on language. Almost immediately the critics assailed Bushnell for his Sabellian views on the Trinity. The Christian Observatory charged him with rejecting the “… commonly received doctrine of a proper Trinity in the Godhead, substituting for it a Pantheistic form of Sabellianism.” The Bible Repertory and Princeton Review, concurring in this judgment, indicated that “This, true enough, is the Sabellianism of Schleiermacher—a threefold revelation of God in the world, in Christ, and in the church.”

One of the most noteworthy and controversial efforts undertaken during the long and memorable pontificate of Leo XIII was the so-called Ralliement policy by which the Pope sought to terminate the Church-State struggle in France which had become so acute in the eighteen-eighties. Almost from the time he ascended the Throne of Peter in 1878 Leo XIII had begun making discreet efforts to mend the widening breach between the Church and the republican regime which France had adopted in 1870 after the destruction of the Second Empire on the battlefield of Sedan. In the early eighteen-nineties this papal effort was intensified to the point where it took on the character of an official policy and helped to foster a movement—a movement opposed from the first by a resistance to which, after a limited success, it finally succumbed in the course of the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the century.

One of the most interesting exponents of the social gospel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the Reverend Charles M. Sheldon of Topeka. Among his many social crusades during his years in the pulpit was his experimentation with the editing of a daily newspaper according to Christian principles.

In 1908–09 Professor Carl Russell Fish of the University of Wisconsin was commisioned as a Research Associate by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., and sent abroad to visit and assess the materials for American history to be found in the various archives of Italy. Out of his labors, done with the precision of a trained historian, came a volume which has long been a standard tool for students and researchers in this field: Fish's Guide to the Materials for American History in Roman and Other Italian Archives, published in 1911 by the Carnegie Institution. Pages 119–95 are devoted to an analysis of those archives of the Catholic Church which are commonly called the Archives of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide in Rome. Fish's analysis is preceded by a brief historical account of this important arm in the ordinary government of the Catholic Church from 1622 (the date of its establishment) until 1911.