As I began researching religion and woman suffrage in the South I asked a prominent historian of southern religion if he knew of any sources. I had assumed that religion and woman suffrage had an intimate relationship in the South, since historians have amply documented the close connection between southern religion and culture. After scraching his head for a moment, however, he commented dryly, “There really aren't any sources. That will be a short paper.” He went on to explain that religious arguments were seldom used in the struggle for woman suffrage, that natural rights ideology and the social benefits of moral women voting were more common defenses than ones based on Scripture. Even antisuffragists relied on the threat of black women voting and the superfluity of women voting when they were represented by their husbands at the ballot box more often than explicitly religious arguments.

William Ellery Channing was an American Schleiermacher, standing at the turning point from the Enlightenment to Transcendentalism, and, like Schleiermacher, he has been treated by historians as the initiator of a movement. He is understood in terms of what followed him. According to Mr. Van Wyck Brooks, he represents the budding of New England. I wish to reverse the perspective and to present Channing as the culmination of the American Enlightenment. In the Revolutionary generation three distinct systems of thought, three historically separate faiths were flourishing; for want of better terms I shall call them rationalism, pietism, and republicanism. Channing, as I shall attempt to show, inherited each of these faiths, understood the issues at stake, felt the struggle intimately, and attempted to formulate a synthesis of all three. His humanitarianism may therefore fittingly be studied as the summation of the ideals of the American Enlightenment. If I had time, I would follow up the negative side of the argument and show that Channing participated only slightly in the thought of the coming generation, the generation from 1830 to 1860, and that he was, on the whole, not willingly a prophet of Transcendentalism. In his last years, when he saw dimly what was to come, he was repelled by much of it and looked back almost wistfully to the faith of his fathers.

On the east bank of the St. John River, sixty miles above the city of St. John and eighteen miles below Fredericton, is an attractive white church building of the New England type. Its graceful spire cannot fail to catch the eye and call forth expressions of admiration as travelers pass by motor or river steamer. This houses the oldest Protestant church organization in what is now the Province of New Brunswick, though this building is not the original one. It was a “society” of the Congregational order, now an integral part of The United Church of Canada, and known as Sheffield.

The thanksgiving sermons offered from Anglican and Puritan pulpits during the seventeenth century, particularly upon such special occasions as proclaimed by Parliament, often led the preacher to consider an important issue for all Reformation Protestants: the response to grace. Whether the specific event were the anniversary of the Spanish Armada, the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot, the defeat of royalist forces at Selby, or the victorious return of the West Indies fleet, the occurrence was interpretable as a special evidence of God's merciful grace. The preacher generally conceived his responsibility to be, first, to remind his congregation of additional mercies, some general in nature (creation, preservation, redemption), and others specific or individual as indicated above. Second, the preacher was to direct his congregation in the manner of its response to these testimonies of grace. Beyond this, the preacher might proceed as he wished. He might fulminate against ingratitude; he might expatiate on the historical or political implications of the event or of past mercies; or he might focus upon the hope for future mercies.

By about 1650, the seventeenth century Puritan search for the New Jerusalem led many an English enthusiast to the conviction that the millennial Kingdom of Christ was at hand. This current in Puritan thought had been gaining force since Thomas Brightman wrote his exegesis on Revelation at the beginning of the century. With the coming of the civil war, the trickle begun by Brightman (and taken up by a few others before 1642) soon developed into a major stream. John Archer, Robert Maton, Jeremiah Burroughes, and William Bridge, to name but some, penned works that increased interest and heightened expectation in the subject during the decade of the forties. The infection even caught John Milton who briefly seemed convinced that the great millennial age was imminent.

While the year 2000 did not prove to be the eschatological blockbuster that some of our bolder Bible prophecy popularizers anticipated, nor the year when all our computers melted down, as some Y2K alarmists predicted, it did provoke some historians to step back from their usual topics of inquiry to attempt to sum up in a broad overview fashion some of the major developments in the century just past. A spate of books like Harvard Sitkoff's edited collection of essays, Perspectives on Modern America, with its subtitle, “Making Sense of the Twentieth Century,” were the result. In that spirit, as 2000 approached, I undertook an even more presumptuous venture: a brief overview of not one but two centuries of Christianity in America, from 1800 to the present, as a kind of outline sketch for a hypothetical book on the subject. The result is this essay. Once I had embarked on such a potentially foolhardy project, the practical question remained: What meaningful generalizations about two centuries of American Christianity could one offer in a relatively short space such as that provided by Church History's “Perspectives” feature? Still, Cotton Mather once boasted that he had boiled down the entire plan of salvation onto a single piece of paper, so from that perspective, five thousand or so words seemed ample indeed.

Christian monasticism in the East has three sources: the original rule of the founder or that of a reformer, laws issued by the Roman emperors, and the canons of church councils. The purpose of this article is to study the latter two, which have received little attention in the scholarly work on monastic life. The close association between church and state, unique to the East, made it incumbent upon the leaders of both the secular and religious hierarchies of Byzantium to oversee the development of monasticism from the fourth to the eighth century. Those 400 years mark the first and normative period of legislation dealing with the monastic life.

The libelous depiction of King Chilperic I (561–584) and his wife Fredegund in Gregory of Tours' Decem Libri Historiarum has encouraged the false impression of these Merovingian monarchs as scourges of the Gallo-Frankish Church and its bishops. If fact, evidence from Gregory's own writings, as well as from other contemporary sources, reveals that Chilperic and Fredegund were generous patrons of ecclesiastical persons, institutions, and cults. A prosopographical database of seventeen episcopal supporters of Chilperic and Fredegund is used to evaluate the means by which the royal couple attracted and maintained episcopal support. The patronage by the royal couple of saint cults and their associated institutions also is examined. It is concluded that Chilperic and Fredegund's ecclesiastical policies are less responsible for their posthumous reputations than the choices that they made in distributing their patronage.

The theory of toleration, often the child of indifference or of sectarian interest, is most difficult to analyse, whatever the issues. It may derive from indifference to the “rights” of conscience, while hiding behind an interested manner. The advocate frequently tolerates religious differences and hysterically cries “Crusade” against an economic heresy; or he shows charity toward one sect and simultaneously invokes the wrath of God and the power of Parliament against another which he considers in error. Often the plea proceeds from a minority whose very existence depends on toleration, but which on becoming a majority, demands conformity from others. Moreover, some men who have evoked a positive philosophy of toleration express only an intellectual interest. Yet whatever the basis— sectarian interest, intellectual sympathy, indifference, or a passionate love of freedom—toleration has always aroused sympathy and devotion.

Pius IX's categorical rejection of an Italian republic from 1848 to his death in 1878 created a daunting task for American Catholic apologists, who wanted to defend their besieged leader without fueling anti-Catholic nationalism.1 The responses, even from those who had oniy minimally defended the papacy's temporal power prior to 1848, exceeded predictable expressions of sympathy. Pius IX's long suffering became the prism through which a beleaguered American Catholic community viewed the whole spectrum of its own experiences of hope and frustration in securing influence in an often hostile society.