Springing from English Puritanism, Congregationalism became the established religion of New England outside Rhode Island and at the time of the American Revolution stood pre-eminent in membership and prestige in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. Congregationalism's position in New England was not, however, indicative of its national appeal. When the Revolutionary War commenced various of the other American religious groups began to organize themselves into national churches. By the early part of the nineteenth century it was apparent that these national churches forged in the midst of a pluralistic society were denominations, i.e., they were voluntary associations of like-minded individuals united to accomplish certain defined objectives. Thus, religious groups in America came to be defined in terms of a common purpose rather than in terms of a special relationship to civil government or even in terms of a precise theological standard.

Early one Canadian winter morning in 1908, a teenage girl knelt to pray, pleading with God to grant her the “baptism of the Holy Spirit.” Soon her petition was answered. Her body began to tremble, she slipped to the ground, and out of her lips escaped murmurs in unknown tongues. The next day, during Sunday services at a little pentecostal mission, the teenager again quaked on the floor while jabbering strange syllables. A parishioner was so shocked that he telephoned the girl's parents and implored them to retrieve the way-ward adolescent immediately. When the young woman learned that her mother was en route, panic engulfed her. How could she make her parents understand? Would they forbid her from worshipping with pentecostals?

In Chaste, Silent and Obedient, Suzanne Hull lists 163 English books written for women (by both sexes) published between 1475 and 1640. Of the eighteen books she classifies as devotional, the second (chronologically) is Thomas Bentley's The Monument of Matrones (1582), an immense book—over 1500 quarto pages—containing prayers and meditations for a variety of occasions, extracts from the Bible, and brief lives of biblical and other model women. Hull has aptly commented that, “In fact, The Monument of Matrones comes close to being an entire female library between two covers.” The iconography of various illustrated pages and some prayers have been analyzed, and some writings by women such as Queen Margaret of Navarre, Queen Katherine Parr, and Lady Jane Dudley, have been anthologized, but the book has not been studied as a whole. Bentley, in his introduction, “To the Christian Reader,” describes the book as a collection of “diuers verie godlie, learned and diuine treatises, of meditationes and praier, made by sundrie right famous Queenes, noble Ladies, vertuous Virgins, and godlie Gentlewomen of al ages” (Bl) which had gone out of print. But is it simply an anthology of standard devotional material? Because it was directed to women, is it an affirmation of egalitarian impulses in Reformation English religious thought? Or does it prescribe the limited range of virtues acceptable to an increasingly patriarchal authority in late sixteenth-century society? It goes without saying that a book as rich and complex as the Monument will contain different, even conflicting, points of view, as the following, necessarily brief, summary will suggest.

The question of post-Reformation Catholicism in England has received increased attention of late from historians of various creeds, with the Elizabethans and the Generation of 1829 exercising a particular fascination. Only the eighteenth century continues to suffer neglect—and this despite the monumental scholarship of an earlier day, when Edwardian ecclesiastics ventured to reconstruct the Georgian world of Bishop Challoner and the missioners of the “Penny Chapels.” Their conclusions now stand in need of fundamental revision, not only in the interests of greater impartiality, but in order to determine more precisely the condition of a religious minority, allegedly subjected to the heaviest disabilities. “Proscribed and persecuted the Catholic faith has notoriously been for the last three centuries,” so wrote the editor of Dolman's Magazine in 1847; and, some fifty years later, neither Bishop Burton nor Bishop Ward thought it necessary to demur. Indeed, for them, the period which culminated in the riots of 1780 so obviously reflected the malice of the Protestant majority as to justify the demand for“Relief”or “Emancipation.”

In September 1529 the Strasbourg printer, Georg Ulricher of Andlau, exhibited to visitors at his stall in the Frankfurt autumn book fair the first copies of a new commentary on the Psalms. The in-quarto volume, amounting in all to over four hundred folios, purported to be the work of a Lyon humanist, one Aretius Felinus. Its author was in fact Martin Bucer, ex-Dominican, now evangelical pastor and rising star of the Strasbourg church. Bucer's refuge in pseudonymity was an attempt—as he explained in a letter to Zwingli—to facilitate circulation of the work in regions like France and the Low Countries where the name of Bucer was likely to bring it to the attention of censors vigilant to stem the flow of heretical literature. It would do no harm either, as he admitted, to dissociate the volume from the name of one who had played so prominent a role in the still lively evangelical quarrel over the Lord's Supper.

The social gospel was one of the most productive intellectual movements to originate from American Protestantism. Essentially, the new religious ideology of the late nineteenth century brought the ethical element of Christianity to bear upon the unprecedented problems of social adjustment caused by the rise of an industrial society. It inspired an outpouring of social criticism and reform activity unequalled in the nation's religious experience. The urban-centered problems of slums, crime, political corruption and industrial strife turned progressive-minded churchmen to the mission of social uplift.

Around 1790, two young sisters born into a slaveholding free black family began instructing Antiguan slaves in literacy and Christianity. The sisters, Anne (1768–1834) and Elizabeth (1771–1833) Hart, first instructed their father's slaves at Popeshead—he may have hired them out rather than using them on his own crops—then labored among enslaved women and children in Antiguan plantations and in towns and ports like St. John's and English Harbour. Soon the sisters came to write about faith, slavery, and freedom. Anne and Elizabeth Hart were moderate opponents of slavery, not abolitionists but meliorationists. When compared to their black American, British, and West African contemporaries, the Hart sisters illuminate the birth of a black antislavery Christianity in the late eighteenth century precisely because they never became abolitionists. The Hart sisters shared with their black contemporaries a vivid sense of racial identity and evangelical Christianity. Yet as meliorationists, the Hart sisters did not oppose slavery as an institution, but rather the vice it spread into the lives of blacks. The difference between the Hart sisters and their contemporaries such as Richard Allen, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, Lemuel Haynes, and John Marrant—all luminaries of black abolitionism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—was that the abolitionists felt themselves citizens of a modern nation-state characterized by power that could be used against slave traders and slaveholders. The Hart sisters never thought of themselves as citizens and abjured political means, including revolution, of ending slavery. This essay aims to describe the Hart sisters' faith and antislavery activity and to analyze the difference between meliorationism and abolitionism in terms of a black writer's ability or inability to identify as a citizen of a modern nation-state.

When South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was assassinated on September 6, 1966, a writer in the Cape Town Afrikaans newspaper, Die Burger, included an instructive comment. He said, “May the God in whom we believe make clear to us in His own good time what this terrible event is to signify to our country and her people.” This statement reminds us of a dimension in South African nationalism which goes beyond the normal interests of a nation. A theological motif is introduced which remains dominant in the South African mind. In the eyes of Afrikaners this theological concern lifts their problems out of the area of purely political and economic discussion for their whole cultural effort involves fulfilling a divine mission.2 Therefore, the death of Hendrik Verwoerd was more than a tragedy for the nation—it was a tragedy with divine implications.

The period 1638–1651 saw the first major purges of the ministry of the reformed kirk in Scotland since the Reformation. These were the forerunners of the later great purges associated with the Restoration (of monarchy and episcopacy) in the 1660s and with the Revolution and re-establishment of presbyterianism in 1688–1690. Before 1638, for all the conflicts within the kirk and in its relations with the state, deposition of ministers had been rare. J. K. Hewison's estimate of 49 deprivations or depositions in 1560–1638 is probably too low, but is of the right order. No detailed study of depositions under the covenanters has ever been made. Hewison calculated that 138 ministers were deprived in the whole of the period 1638–1660. but this figure is far too low. More recentestimates (again covering 1638–1660) of about 200, and of about 210 depositions come much nearer the truth, but they also are too low; there were more depositions than this even in 1638–1651. Considering the importance attached to the depositions after 1660 and after 1688 as indicating the acceptability to ministers of the religious changes then introduced and the extent of persecution, it is rather surprising that so little attention has been paid to the predecessors of these purges— though James Bulloch's two useful local studies of depositions do cover the whole of the seventeenth century.

It is one of the peculiarities of the writing of Protestant church history that the history of Christian missions since the Reformation plays a very unimportant part within the general historical scene. The religious and theological conflicts on the European continent and the beginnings of churches in North America have claimed all the interest of the historians so that the history of missions has appeared to be a kind of subordinate subject. The reason for this underemphasizing of the history of Protestant missions is first of all the fact that there existed, as a kind of insuperable prejudice, the opinion that the Reformers—Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and Zwingli—were not interested at all in Christian missions. Only the latest turn of clesiastical historiography has included Christian missions again in general church history and put them in the place which they deserve.

The early humanism in Italy from the second half of the fourteenth to the middle of the fifteenth century, characterized by the discovery and revival of classical antiquity, was at the same time the first expression of modern ideals and feelings. Although it was in several points closely connected with the preceding age, it produced a lively reaction against the medieval civilization and its form of philosophical and scientific thought, scholasticism. Petrarch, the father of humanism, began the polemics against scholasticism which have remained since then a commonplace in the writings of his followers: according to him the scholastics wasted their time in subtle and useless disputations without resolving the basic questions of human life; their unpolished Latin style was a consequence of their barbarous thought; they could not be compared with the great writers and thinkers of classical antiquity whom they were not able to read or imitate; and even their chief authority, Aristotle, in many respects must be considered inferior to his greater master, Plato.

The purpose of this essay is to bring another candle to an understanding of John Calvin as a theologian, by way of a look at some rhetorical traits in his Institutes of the Christian Religion. That Calvin was an eminent theologian or that the Institutes is a classic of theological literature is not examined, for neither is generally disputed. Our specific concern is with the question of what happens to theological subject matter when it is put in rhetorical form. Accordingly, this essay is divided into three parts: I—The proper marks of a style suitable to theology, and how the humanists, including Calvin, felt about this; II—A look at some rhetorical traits in the Institutes; and III—Some conclusions.

The great pearl of Reformed piety, assurance of salvation, eluded Richard Rogers, Essex presbyterian activist, in theearly 1580s. Rogers “languished long” in “unsettledness in my life” “untill wofull experience” drove him to search out a more reliable method of obtaining a steady assurance. He decided that only a steady, highly reflective, and rigorous course of life could keep assurance constant. To that end, Rogers devised “a more certain manner of direction for me through the daie and the weeke.” His new method combined continual selfreminders of God's blessings with strict activities of piety and selfscrutiny, and through it, he found the settled peace he had been seeking.

Since the very beginnings of Mormon history, non-Mormon historians (and “anti-Mormon” polemicists) have traced the sources of the religion in one way or another to some conception of New England. The conceptions have been as varied as the writers themselves: New England has been the land of both enthusiasm and rational religion; of educated, enlightened Yankees and of credulous, antiintellectual Yankees; of a culture east of the Hudson and of a culture extending across the northern half of the United States; a region of people with great civic and religious virtue but also a people noted for deception, cunning, and hypocrisy. The problem of the New England Mind has never been settled, but all writers have assumed that at one time or another western New York, the supposed birthplace of Mormonism, was a “frontier” of New England.

Richard Whately, Archbishop of Dublin (1831–1863), has been characterized as a representative of the Broad Church movement of the early to mid-nineteenth century. Convinced that the Church of England's sacraments and liturgies, indeed its very structure, should correspond to the times and not to some ancient formulary, Whately argued continuously for a general reformation of its rules and regulations and for a separate church body to arbitrate disputes over spiritual matters. Recognizing the force of his arguments on these and myriad other subjects, a reviewer for the Christian Observer commented that “the Archbishop is a great intellectual gladiator, and all parties will confess that it is far pleasanter to have him with them than against them.” The nature of his role as a Christian advocate also was noted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “He showed a rare union of literary talent, knowledge of human nature, and administrative ability, and the work that he accomplished places him in the highest rank of Christian statesmen. … [His essays] have had a wide influence upon the course of religious thought in England for more than a quarter of a century.”

The story of the Kingdom movement of the 1890's is one of the most important chapters in the history of American social Christianity. In the middle years of the 1890's the Christian social movement really began to exert significant influence upon the American Protestant churches and to modify the character of certain denominations. The Kingdom movement played an important role in the events of these crucial years.

In the early part of the fourteenth century, a parish priest in Brussels came into the possession of a manuscript containing the vernacular letters, visions, and poetry of a woman known only as “beata Hadewijch.” The priest prized the manuscript, even recommending it to his fellow conventuals decades later, and included its primary tropes of courtly love mysticism (Minnemystik) as an essential part of many of his writings on the active, interior, and contemplative ways to mystical union. This local priest turned canon regular, Jan van Ruusbroec (1292–1381), has been celebrated for centuries for his Trinitarian theology, for his speculative or essence mysticism, and for his negative theology—but Ruusbroec's reliance on Hadewijch's metaphor of courtly love has only recently become a subject of scholarly study. An examination of the parallels between Hadewijch and Ruusbroec's theology, a heavily Trinitarian theology conveyed by means of the metaphor of Minne, not only serves to expand our comprehension of their theologies, but also provides a unique perspective on the religious experience of medieval men and women.

An issue that inevitably appears in discussion concerning historical method is the degree to which a historian's philosophical presuppositions influence his historical work. It is not surprising that the matter is most heatedly discussed in the realm of New Testament interpretation, although the principles involved concern all historical work.

According to the biblical book of Daniel chapter 3, King Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled the Babylonian Empire where the Jews lived in exile, commissioned the building of a ninety-foot golden image and commanded the people to worship it. Refusal to comply meant one's death in a fiery furnace. While most obeyed the king's dictate, the story recounts how Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego, Jews who worked for the king, refused to worship the image and remained loyal to their God. In response, the king bade his men to stoke the furnace and burn the defiant rebels. To the king's amazement, the trio appeared unscathed amid the red-hot flames, and he glimpsed a mysterious fourth figure with them. Seeing this, the king called the men to come out of the furnace and they emerged unharmed, protected, according to the text, by the fourth figure, an angel. The story depicts Shadrach, Meschach, and Abednego as heroes who withstood the forces of evil and witnessed the power of their God. It speaks to the fidelity of these men and to the intolerant nature of Nebuchadnezzar's faith. While this passage and its lessons may be familiar to many, in the 1920s they gained additional meanings that provide us with important insights into the workings of religious intolerance in the United States.

During the twelfth century the papacy in the interest of peace within the Christian community gradually took a more active part in the mediation and settlement of secular disputes. Innocent III regarded such mediation as an obligation of his office, and throughout his pontificate he sought to promote more harmonious relations among Christian princes. In his correspondence he referred on several occasions to the words of the Psalmist, “…seek peace, and pursue it.” He often cited Christ's counsels of peace as in the Gospel of John, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.” At the beginning of the thirteenth century peace was not only a worthy end in itself; it could have the additional advantage of freeing the European princes to fight as crusaders in a cause which Innocent zealously fostered.