Whenever Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, stood before newly baptized Christians on Easter week, his task seemed straightforward: to explain the meaning of the initiations they had recently undergone. His explanations, however, were peppered with dialogue, as he thought aloud about the impression these rites had made on the new converts. He recounted the previous days' events in these words: “You went, you washed, you came to the altar, you began to see what you had not seen before.” This promise of novel sights, however, could not dispel the neophytes' lingering doubts. Aloud, he imagined their questions: “Is this that great mystery which the eye has not seen nor the ear heard … ? I see waters which I used to see daily; are these able to cleanse me?” Ambrose wondered if the baptism lacked sufficient majesty, such that a catechumen might ask, “‘Is this all?’” Ambrose already knew what he would reply, “Yes, this is all, truly all.” Baptism, the rite often timed to coincide with Easter, might disappoint as much as it inspired awe.

Already famous for his best-selling books on Christian devotion and increasingly infamous for his attempts at a theological synthesis of Calvinist and Arminian perspectives on salvation—which (no surprise) pleased hardly anyone—Richard Baxter (1615–91) nearly succeeded in redefining English pastoral practice before the Restoration brought his experiment in pastor-led, parish-based reformation to a frustrating end. At the core of his efforts to bring reformation to Kidderminster lay his efforts to establish a parish-based system of church discipline that would preserve the integrity of the sacraments and thus rob separatists of one of their primary excuses for abandoning the parochial system. This article seeks to place Baxter's effort to develop a strategy for an effective church discipline in its historical context. In particular, I will first consider the precedents to the system which Richard Baxter developed for St. Mary's parish. Special attention will be given to Martin Bucer's Reformation-era prescription for reforming the discipline of the church and the intriguing possibility that Baxter's strategy was actually a recovery of Bucerian pastoral emphases. Second, I will trace the evolution of Baxter's own program for discipline. Finally, I will discuss the impact Baxter's discipline had on his wider goal of reformation, both in his parish and beyond.

In his Faithful Narrative of a Surprising Work of God, an account of the awakening of 1734–35 in his church at Northampton, Massachusetts, Jonathan Edwards excitedly reported a considerable number of old persons among the several hundred converts. “I suppose,” he wrote, “there were … more than twenty of them above fifty, and about ten of them above sixty, and two of them above seventy years of age.” Edwards's evident self-satisfaction stemmed from the widespread belief that conversion among the elderly was unusual. “It has been a thing heretofore rarely to be heard of,” he noted, “that any were converted past middle age; but now we have the same ground to think that many such have in this time been savingly changed, as that others have been so in more early years.”

In 1834 the rector of St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Burlington, New Jersey desired to place a cross atop his newly-refurbished sanctuary. No ordinary rector, George Washington Doane also served as the Episcopal bishop of New Jersey. Shortly after taking charge of St. Mary's in 1833, he and his vestry had decided to renovate their old church, and their ambitious new design featured a cruciform plan with Greek details, including a pediment adorned with lotus leaves and a tower “derived from that built at Athens… commonly called the Tower of the Winds.” But when Doane carried out the plans for “an enriched Greek Cross” to be mounted on the roof, the community stood aghast. A local Presbyterian minister chronicled the confrontation, and he began by asserting that most of St. Mary's vestrymen had originally approved the designs without “noticing the Cross at the time.” The project was thus completed, and to the vestry's “great surprise, as well as that of many in the community, of all ‘denominations’—lo! a Cross made quite a Catholic appearance on the apex of the pediment!” Controversy arose, “both in the Vestry and out of it,” and “after a very warm meeting, one of the Vestry shortly after declared that unless the Cross was taken down very soon, it should be pulled down.”

Pentecostalism originated in the body as much as the spirit. The “full gospel” it proclaimed promised renewed health along with saved souls, and its embryonic ethos prized the human embodiment of divine initiative. Glossolalia and other ecstatic manifestations authenticated God's presence and power, reflecting the reality of the Holy Spirit within believers. But the materiality of the culture that gave rise to Pentecostalism received its fullest expression in “divine healing.” Suffering men and women yearned for the restoration of their broken bodies, and their faith provided it.