In 1912, Andrew Murray, an influential spokesperson for the Keswick theology prevalent in American fundamentalism, decried the sorry state of spirituality among modern Christians. How many there are, he exclaimed, who “say that they have no time and that the heart desire for prayer is lacking; they do not know how to spend half an hour with God! … Day after day, month after month passes, and there is no time to spend one hour with God.” Closing his jeremiad, Murray exclaimed, “How many there are who take only five minutes for prayer!” A few years later, Herbert Willett and Charles Clayton Morrison, editors of The Christian Century, the voice of the emerging liberal movement in American Protestantism, published a daily devotional guide entitled The Daily Altar. Its purpose was to provide Christians with “a few moments of quiet and reflection” in the midst of “short and crowded days” in order to maintain a daily prayer life. To be precise, devotions in The Daily Altar took one and a half minutes to complete.

The year 1602 put the Unity of the Brethren to a severe test. Three years before, the long and systematic efforts of the papal nuncio in Bohemia had resulted in the fall of Chancellor Charles Želinský, and the highest offices of the realm had passed into the hands of Catholics— representatives, for the most part, of the new aggressive generation, who made no secret of their intention to wipe out the evangelical faith in Bohemia, and who had indeed begun energetically to work in that direction. Zdeněk Lobkovic, more of a Spaniard than a Czech, had been put at the head of the government, and at his side were Jaroslav Martinic and the convert William Slavata.

A recent article on tyrannicide in an authoritative Catholic reference work states that there exist few official pronouncements of the Church on this controversial subject2. The only ruling on the legitimacy of putting to death a tyrannical ruler mentioned is the highly ambiguous decree of the Council of Constance in 1415. In the interest of greater accuracy and fuller historical knowledge it may be in place to bring to light a secret brief on tyrannicide issued in 1615 by Pope Paul V in which he approved and renewed the decree of Constance. This brief assumes special significance in view of the fact that until then the earlier decree had never been explicitly confirmed by any pope and thus could be considered as not binding. Moreover, the circumstances under which the brief was issued have received inadequate, and sometimes deliberately distorted, treatment that calls for clarification and correction.

Those conversant with the history of mediaeval education are generally aware of the fact that clerks studying in a theological faculty were permitted, during the thirteenth century, to enjoy their ecclesiastical rents in absentia1. The Super Speculam of Honorius III is often cited as the basis of this practice, although many scholars also know that the custom was in use, on a local scale, before 1219. The present writer does not wish, at the moment, to inquire into the origins of the practice, nor does he intend to offer any new interpretation of Honorius' famous bull.

Historians who have been concerned with Christian missions to the Indians of Oregon have generally limited their writings to denominational histories or to biographies glorifying the missionaries. Little has been done to correlate the efforts of the various individuals and denominations involved, in the light of the economic and political situation, so necessary for the presentation of a complete picture of the total missionary enterprise in the proper perspective. In this brief paper an attempt will be made to do just this.

From the end of 1494 to the spring of 1498 Girolamo Savonarola of Ferrara was a prophet with honor in his adopted country. The Florentines believed in his divine mandate and in his message that the French invader, Charles VIII, was the instrument of God, come to punish the corrupt Church and the sinful Italians and to institute a universal reform. Believing, as he told them, that Florence was divinely chosen to lead the way, the Florentines gave Savonarola the opportunity—rare for prophets— of translating his vision into a practical program. From the pulpit Savonarola taught the first city of the Renaissance how to become the first city of the New Age. Florence, reformed by the friar and his followers, was to be the center from which the spiritual light would illuminate the world.

Once in a while, an occasion turns out to be historic, historical, and historiographical. Such an occasion was the conference on the Canadian Evangelical Experience held at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, early in May 1995. This four-day conference devoted to the history of evangelicalism in Canada (thus “historical”) was the first of its kind in this country, and marked the emergence of a critical mass of scholarship in this field (thus “historic”). It has become a considerable enough mass, in fact, that this review will confine itself to published books and particularly those published in the last ten years. It is a “critical” mass, furthermore, in that the conference raised explicitly and implicitly serious questions about the writing of Canadian evangelical history, some of which this essay will discuss (thus “historiographical”).