In the latter half of the fifteenth century, during the reign of Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490), and in the early sixteenth century, some Hungarian churchmen enhanced religious scholarship in their own country and abroad by their preaching and writing. The writings of these men exemplify the development in Hungary of support for the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. These men also spoke out against the moral and spiritual deficiencies of the court. The activities and writings of these theologians pose a challenge to the chronicler of literature and of intellectual and religious history.

It is possible to be so familiar with a subject that one no longer sees its peculiar features. Roger Fry, the English art critic, spoke of a specialization of vision that prevents us from observing familiar objects around us until artists awaken us to the distinctive reality of what we have overlooked by lending us their eyes. Historical discoveries are often very much like an aesthetic awakening. Only a relatively small percentage are prompted by the discovery of wholly new and previously unknown evidence. The great majority are stimulated by fresh insight into evidence so familiar that its significance has been underestimated or disregarded.

During the 1520s the city council of Zurich, with the full cooperation of Zwingli, created a Reformed community in which all powers of discipline were placed in the hands of the city magistrates. Both Zwingli's theory of the Christian community and the council's actions to create such a community had their roots in the late medieval communal idea which viewed the city as a “sacral community.” This corporate ideal led to the blurring of the distinctions between the civil and ecclesiastical communities.Zwingli's theory also had roots in the thought of Marsilius of Padua, Occam, and Zwingli's contemporary, Erasmus.

Research into the origins of bishops is not new, but it has taken on increasing importance within the last twenty years. In 1965 an important introductory study of the social origins of French bishops between the years 1150 and 1350 appeared under the auspices of the Institut de Droit Canonique de Strassbourg. Since then, other studies on the origins of the French episcopate have followed. Despite the fact that these studies possess intrinsic value as manifestations of interest in the family and social origins, the method employed in them raises questions. It is the scope of the studies—not so much in terms of chronology as in numbers of bishops considered—that is problematic. The large numbers of candidates considered render scrutiny of individual candidates and electoral processes impossible.

Throughout his career John Carroll supported the American religious settlement with surprising and consistent enthusiasm. Indeed, his enthusiasm for the religious liberty of the new republic seemed to be boundless. Thus he never tired of celebrating and advertising its benefits. He assured American Catholics that it was “a signal instance of [God's] mercy” and a product of the active intervention of Divine Providence and the Holy Spirit, who have “tutored the minds of men” in such a way that Catholics could now freely worship God according to the “dictates of conscience.” Flushed with pride, he even predicted that if America were wise enough to abide by the terms of this providential arrangement, the nation would become a beacon to the world, proving that “general and equal toleration…is the most effectual method to bring all denominations of Christians to an unity of faith.” Finally, confident that the extraordinary freedom accorded American Catholics would make the American church “the most flourishing portion of the church,” he urged European states and churches to follow America's inspired lead.

America's first unmarried female missionaries, women who went out to Asia and Africa in the early to middle nineteenth century, chose lives as intense and demanding as any man's. They chose the foreign mission vocation despite the belief, strong in their era, that women should accept the constraints and comforts of their “proper sphere,” the home. To make their decision, these women struggled with two sets of ideas which coexisted in tension: equality of all persons before God, and the ideology of “woman's sphere.” As persons of faith they could respond to God's commands in the same way as men without theological challenge, because equality of all persons before God was a major strand in their Christian tradition. As nineteenth-century women, however, they were asked to accept lowered status and protective restrictions, in keeping with woman's sphere ideology. These women chose to become missionaries, compromising on second-class status and protective restrictions. In their view, the missionary vocation was worth the cost of compromise.

The second general council of Ephesus was convened on August 8, 449, and adjourned some fourteen days later by the legates of Theodosius II, who promptly confirmed the council's canons and decrees. It had been as regular, or irregular, as Nicea I or Ephesus I had been, and far more general than the Constantinopolitan synod of 381. Its chief importance lay in registering another splendid victory for the Alexandrines. The “school” of Antioch was shattered beyond repair; Pope Leo and the Westerners were walled off and weakened; the bare notion of “two natures” was branded as Nestorian; every principal see in the East was manned by a henchman of Dioscoros. Moreover, the emperor and his grand chamberlain (the eunuch Chrysaphius, godson to Eutyches) were prepared to support Alexandrine policy with police power.

In English history, 1688 is best remembered as the year of the Glorious Revolution. But that same year also witnessed the death of John Bunyan (1628–1688), the Nonconformist Bedford minister widely known as the author of The Pilgrim's Progress (1678; part two, 1684) and a preacher capable of drawing 3,000 persons to Sunday sermons in London. In subsequent centuries his fame increased, and, partly through translations into numerous languages, his story of Christian's pilgrimage became known in nearly every region of the world. In our own time his life and work have drawn the attention of many scholars from several fields, and the publication in modern editions of all of his sixty printed works has been undertaken. In 1988 the tercentenary of his death has been observed by a variety of activities including scholarly conferences and publications.

Theologically and ecclesiologically James I of England was a “Gentleman of Wide Swallow.” Although he did not possess the type of skepticism that later emerged in post-Restoration latitudinarianism, he did endorse as orthodox only those essential doctrines which Christians had agreed upon in the early centuries of the church, which were grounded in the “expresse word of God” and given their most basic formulation in the creeds. The king viewed himself as an irenic monarch, one who could bring peace to Christendom by promoting an accommodation to these essentials and compromise between conflicting parties. This was an ecumenical approach to religion for his day, and he believed he could help disagreeing Christians “meet in the middest which is the center and perfection of all things.”

In 1875 the distinguished Unitarian minister and local historian Henry Wilder Foote preached a eulogy for his late colleague, the Reverend James Walker, philosopher and former president of Harvard University. It was an appropriate occasion to characterize the achievement of the antebellum generation of Harvard Unitarian leaders that Walker represented. “They were much more than mere denominationalists or founders of a sect,” Foote declared. “The whole tone of their teaching was profoundly positive in its moral and religious quality. Trained at our American Cambridge, they were really the legitimate heirs of that noble group of men nurtured at the Cambridge of England–the Latitude Men, as they were called–who blended culture and piety and rational thought in their teaching.” Building upon Foote's perceptive characterization, this article will explore the significance of the seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists for the Harvard Unitarians of the mid-nineteenth century. In so doing it may illuminate other forms of New England religious thought that also drew upon Platonic or Neoplatonic sources, including Edwardseanism, Hopkinsianism, and the progressive orthodoxy of Horace Bushnell. In particular, I hope to shed light on the relationship between Unitarianism and Transcendentalism.

The names of George Fox, William Penn, and Margaret Fell occupy a premier place among the leaders of seventeenth-century English Quakerism. George Fox, Quaker tradition has claimed, was the prophetic and preeminent first-generation leader from 1652 until his death in 1691. William Penn's chief claim to historical fame was his founding of the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania, as well as his prolific writings in defense of Quakerism and religious toleration in England. Margaret Fell, who married Fox in 1669, has been epitomized most frequently as the “Mother of Quakerism,” a hagiographic title that leaves her role imprecisely defined. Margaret Fell's position was a powerful one in the organization of nascent Quakerism. She came under Fox's influence while Judge Fell, her first husband, was still living. At first a novitiate under Fox's spiritual guidance, she soon became an apt apologist and grass-roots organizer who equaled and in most cases exceeded other leaders in edifying, guiding, and sustaining the Quaker cause. Although Fell, Fox, and Penn were long-term friends despite a wide age difference, Fell's real-life role in this triumvirate of early Quaker leadership largely has been lost in the obscurity and myth of Quaker beginnings.

One of the ironies in the annals of nineteenth-century American Protestantism is the impact that Horace Bushnell's famed address “Dogma and Spirit” had upon the theological scene. In his remarks before the Porter Rhetorical Society at Andover Seminary in September 1848, the Congregationalist minister from Hartford established his reputation as one of the more controversial, if not gifted, theologians in New England. Bushnell offered a vision of Christianity that he hoped would eliminate the theological bickering that, as he saw it, had plagued the church throughout its history. To be sure, many in Andover's audience would not have been surprised if Bushnell's quirky views on the Trinity and the Atonement drew fire from New England Calvinists. But few would have predicted that this reconciliatory address would provoke one of the era's more noteworthy debates, a lengthy one-and-a-half-year, 250-page quarrel between America's two most prominent Calvinist theologians, Princeton Seminary's Charles Hodge and Andover's Edwards A. Park.

The writings of the so-called Apostolic Fathers (a term used by the Monophysite Severus of Antioch in the sixth century) present us not only with a fascinating theological literature but also with some difficult problems in regard to its nature. Thomas Elborowe translated Ignatius, Polycarp, and Barnabas and entitled his published work (London, 1668) “a prospect of the primitive Christianity, as it was left by Christ to his apostles, by the apostles to their disciples Saint Polycarp and Holy Ignatius, both contemporaries with and disciples to the Holy Evangelist and Apostle Saint John.” The neatness of this part of the prospect was somewhat marred by the inclusion of Barnabas. “His following epistle indeed,” Elborowe wrote, “may not prove so very acceptable to some, in regard of his strange explications of scripture, which are not after the modern and more refined mode. But it is to be noted that, when he wrote, Christianity was but in the cradle, and scarce advanced into her morning dress.” Nearly three hundred years later Mgr. G. Jouassard, writing in the Mélanges de science religieuse (1957), was facing problems not unlike those stated or implied by Elborowe. What is the value of the Apostolic Fathers? What kind of authority do they have? Are they any more valuable than such a document as the Epistle of the Apostles? They are hard to classify as literature and they come from a long period of time. Both “apostolic” and “fathers” are words which ascribe more importance to them than they really deserve.

One of the most boldly conceived assaults on benighted Africa during the nineteenth century was that undertaken by mainline Protestant denominations in the United States. With the brash confidence characteristic of the age, hundreds of American missionaries were dispatched from New York and Baltimore to convert the heathen tribes of Africa and wrest a continent from ruin. If the experience of the Protestant Episcopal church is at all typical, however, these efforts not infrequently aroused suspicion and open hostility. In fact, Episcopal penetration of Liberia in the second half of the second century was remarkable for a long and bitter contest with black nationalists who were intent on using the church as a vehicle for their own personal and racial ambitions.

The jurisdiction of the Roman see is, and always has been, a point of controversy, not merely between the adherents of that see and all other Christians, but even among those who look with reverence akin to devotion to the successor of St. Peter. It is not merely a legal question, it is essentially a theological question, and as a doctrine it must be dejure divino. Accordingly, it has been discussed with that acrimony which as from a psychological necessity is characteristic of so many theological disputes. But discussion of the development of the doctrine and practice does not necessarily involve polemics. For a doctrine may be true or false, and to show this is a matter of exegesis and systematic theology, but to show that as finally stated it was the result of a long development is not to touch upon the question of its truth at all. Thus one may ask as to a doctrine closely connected with that we are to discuss, does the teaching of the Church as stated in the Bull, Unam Sanctam, appear in the second or third century as an article of belief required to be held by all Christians as a condition for receiving the sacraments? To show that it does not so appear, is merely to show what nearly every one acknowledges as to almost any doctrine not involved in modern polemics, that in the earliest ages they were not formulated with any great precision, in fact were expressed in forms sometimes afterward regarded as even heretical. Such a doctrine as the appellate jurisdiction may be studied in the same historical and non-polemical spirit as the doctrines of the atonement, incarnation, grace, or the sacraments.

The success of early Methodism in the textile-manufacturing region of Yorkshire and Lancashire is an important part of the overall story of the success of the Methodists. That Wesley's teachings and societies should have thrived in this rough area is almost as surprising as the success of the Wesleyans in Cornwall. Any attempt to explain this growth must include an investigation into the question: what kind of people chose to join the Methodists? Earlier historians of Methodism, including John Wesley Bready, Leslie F. Church, Maldwyn Edwards, W. J. Warner, and Robert F. Wearmouth, have offered largely impressionistic overviews of the social structure of early Methodism. The best way to obtain a more precise picture is to look at those records of individual circuits, such as the Keighley Methodist circuit, which provide occupational data.

Gerasim Petrovich Pavskii (1787–1863) was arguably the brightest pupil of Russia's most-noted nineteenth-century prelate, Metropolitan of Moscow Filaret Drozdov. Pavskii's work under the tutelage of Filaret dated from the future Moscow metropolitan's rectorate at the St. Petersburg Theological Academy, 1812–1817. Yet in the subsequent twenty-five years following Filaret's appointment to the episcopate in 1817, the young theologian and philologist Pavskii would break decisively with his former rector. That break culminated in the celebrated Pavskii Affair of 1841–1844—the so-called Delo Pavskogo—a far-reaching synodal investigation that dramatized the deep divisions in the Orthodox church of Nicolaevan Russia. On one level, these divisions involved issues of modern biblical textology. It is the thesis of this work, however, that alongside the textological issues were deep-seated differences over Orthodox piety and church polity that conditioned the responses of the esteemed metropolitan and the erudite theologian. This fundamental divide within Russian Orthodoxy was never reconciled and, indeed, has continued to the present in modified form within religious circles of the Russian emigration.

Pope Pius X called Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) “the greatest saint of modern times.“ For anyone who grew up in the pre-Vatican II church, she was the most popular model of virtue. Her “little way of spiritual childhood” showed Catholics how each of them could practice their faith and gain salvation. The “Little Flower of Jesus” was, above all, a saint for the ordinary person, a heroine without heroics, a mystic who did not soar but through her language brought God and her relationship to him down to earth.

Some years ago, as part of his Rotary International commitments, Mormon General Authority Marion D. Hanks spent several holiday afternoons ringing the bell over a Salvation Army charity kettle on Main Street in Salt Lake City. Though he never was approached directly on the matter, rumors spread that other high church officials were not happy with his participating so publicly in the activities of another religious organization. The incident suggests that there are ambiguities in the principles and practice of philanthropy by the Latter-day Saint church which may not be fully understood. It is the purpose of this paper in an exploratory and suggestive way to unravel these ambiguities.