There is no man or movement in modern Irish history that can be intelligibly discussed apart from the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. That Church had for centuries been intimately bound up with nearly every phase of Irish life. Taking the measure of so complex and venerable an institution is an enormous task. Since there is no general history of the Church in Ireland, the main difficulty is in maintaining perspective. In confining the discussion to the narrower limits of the relations between the Irish Labour movement and the Church, an obvious distortion is attendent. Seeing the Church in microcosm is not seeing it whole and constant, if indeed such a thing is possible. Examining it with regard to Irish Labour is actually taking liberties with its historical context. Two unequal figures are in contention on the Irish stage, and the Church, which is certainly the larger of the two, suffers proportionately by having to play so limited a role.

It must appear somewhat strange that the ecumenical ideas which were developed by German Protestantism in the first half of the nineteenth century have never, to the best of my knowledge, been treated systematically and exhaustively, especially in view of the fact that these decades were unusually fruitful in producing various serious contributions to the discussion of the question of the unity and disunity of the Church.1 The brief remarks, for instance, in RouseNeill (eds.), A History of the Ecumenical Movement, 1517–1948, are quite inadequate.2 I have set myself the task in this paper merely to call attention to two of these nineteenth century German contributions to the ecumenical discussion, namely Schelling's and Schleiermacher's.

One of the most noteworthy and controversial efforts undertaken during the long and memorable pontificate of Leo XIII was the so-called Ralliement policy by which the Pope sought to terminate the Church-State struggle in France which had become so acute in the eighteen-eighties. Almost from the time he ascended the Throne of Peter in 1878 Leo XIII had begun making discreet efforts to mend the widening breach between the Church and the republican regime which France had adopted in 1870 after the destruction of the Second Empire on the battlefield of Sedan. In the early eighteen-nineties this papal effort was intensified to the point where it took on the character of an official policy and helped to foster a movement—a movement opposed from the first by a resistance to which, after a limited success, it finally succumbed in the course of the Dreyfus affair at the turn of the century.

By December, 1927, Church of England Prayer Book Revision was twenty-one years old. It had developed a mystique of its own. The hand of God was at once seen in its overthrow, and appeal to divine Providence does not seem far from some modern interpretations of the events of 1927-30. Anthony Howard thinks the episode reveals the Church of England “as the suffering servant of a secular state,” a curious view when the suffering Church's policy was so emphatically “‘not quite straight.’” The Liturgical Commission finds “the hand of Providence” in the failure of the bishops to carry their Book, or indeed to terminate the emergency created by this failure. Stephen Neill has another theory: that the compromises accepted in 1929-30 were, though illogical and irresolute, typical of the spirit of the nation—which had been engaged with consistency and tenacity in fierce controversy over the issue for several years before. The final proof of these appeals to national or divine wisdom is the assertion that the Book was a very poor Book anyway, though used very widely in the Church of England today.

The appearance of the first two volumes of a reprint edition of some of Ferdinand Christian Baur's most important writings marks an important event in contemporary historical theology: the rediscovery of a man whom Emanuel Hirsch has called “the greatest and at the same time the most controversial theologian to be produced by German evangelical Christianity since Schleiermacher.” Baur's greatness consists in his recognition of the radically historical quality of the Christian Church and Christian faith, and in his concomitant development of an historical method appropriate to a critical and theological study of the Church and its founding events, a study which he understood to be an intrinsically proper and necessary theological discipline. The controversy over Baur has been generated partially with respect to the extent of his alleged “Hegelianism,” and partially with respect to the validity of his attempt to discover the “truth” of Christianity by means of historical-critical theology. Criticism of him has arisen more often out of misunderstanding, but sometimes precisely out of recognition of what he was trying to achieve theologically. This new edition of some of his major works will help to base both acclaim and criticism on the latter rather than the former ground; and it surely will enhance our appreciation of the greatness and originality of this strangely neglected man, who stands as such an essential link between Schleiermacher at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the Ritschlians at the end, but who belongs to neither.

The intention of this paper is to lay down a fundamental scheme for the interpretation of the work of Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889). It is not my purpose to present any sort of a critique of Ritschl's work, nor do I intend to present copious documentation for the assertions that the man made. Rather, the paper will present as cogently as possible a framework of thought which is a viable hermeneutical key for understanding and interpreting Ritschl.

One of the most interesting exponents of the social gospel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the Reverend Charles M. Sheldon of Topeka. Among his many social crusades during his years in the pulpit was his experimentation with the editing of a daily newspaper according to Christian principles.

In 1908–09 Professor Carl Russell Fish of the University of Wisconsin was commisioned as a Research Associate by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., and sent abroad to visit and assess the materials for American history to be found in the various archives of Italy. Out of his labors, done with the precision of a trained historian, came a volume which has long been a standard tool for students and researchers in this field: Fish's Guide to the Materials for American History in Roman and Other Italian Archives, published in 1911 by the Carnegie Institution. Pages 119–95 are devoted to an analysis of those archives of the Catholic Church which are commonly called the Archives of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide in Rome. Fish's analysis is preceded by a brief historical account of this important arm in the ordinary government of the Catholic Church from 1622 (the date of its establishment) until 1911.