In his economic history of the Schwarzwald, published in 1891, Eberhard Gothein called attention to the connection between Calvinism and modern capitalism.

Thirteen years later, in a series of brilliant essays, Max Weber insisted that Calvinism and capitalism were intimately related and alluded to such Calvinistic virtues as secular asceticism, thrift, and predestination as significant elements in the situation.2

1. The Erastian Bondage of the Church:

The promise of Magna Charta “that the English Church shall be free and have her rights entire and her liberties inviolate,” went largely unfulfilled. The autonomy of the Church was dreamt of by men like Stephen Langton and Robert Grosseteste, but it was never realized. In the Middle Ages it was restricted by the assertion of the jurisdiction of the Pope on the one hand, and of the King on the other. Magna Charta marked the humiliation of the King and met with the prompt condemnation of the Pope. By a long series of events between ca. 1350 and ca. 1570, the Pope's cause in England was lost, and in the same course of events the royal power was greatly enhanced. So far as constitutional autonomy was concerned the Church was now in a weaker state than before. The gates of a prison-house of Erastianism closed about her. A blight fell upon her governing institutions. Her Convocations were not permitted to function, and after 1718 were discontinued, except for pro forma meetings held for the purpose, as Edmund Burke phrased it, “of making some polite ecclesiastical compliments to the King.” Burke spoke for the politicians of his century when he added: “It is wise to permit its legal existence only.” Because Convocation's last acts had been attended by strife, the fear that its revival would mean a renewal of unseemly contention was habitually invoked as an answer to the few who ventured to suggest that step.

Obviously, the most valuable parts of Foxe's Acts and Monuments are the accounts which he gives of the disciplinary measures by means of which the ecclesiastical authorities of England endeavored to make good their claim to supreme jurisdiction over the faith and morals of their subjects, particularly during the reign of Henry VIII and that of Mary. Although Foxe repeatedly stated that he “professed no such title to write of martyrs,” it was as a history of ecclesiastical persecution primarily, that the work was hailed with delight by all factions of English Protestants. The public lost no time dubbing it “Foxe's Book of Martyrs,” the title by which it has ever since been popularly known. Those who had safely lived through the dreadful tempora Mariana, either as exiles abroad or as heretics at home, eagerly scanned its pages for some mention of relatives or acquaintances who had perished in the flames rekindled by Mary and her councillors. Many of its readers, not looking for it, were no doubt gratified as well as surprised to find their own names woven into the story of religious and patriotic heroism, a factor which contributed not a little to the enormous popularity of the work. It was not, then, for the history of the Waldenses or the Turks or the Husites that people turned to the Acts and Monuments, at least not primarily; their chief interest lay in Foxe's history of the English martyrs —Lollard, Henrician, and Marian.

It is a well known fact that the Lutheran Reformation has found entrance mostly into the nations of the Germanic race. The larger part of Germany and the northern countries around the Baltic Sea are Lutheran. Lutheranism has also gathered small groups in France, Holland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, but it is safe to say that there exists a certain affinity between the Lutheran faith and the Germanic race. The Reformed faith, in the form of Calvinism or of the Zwinglian Reformation, has a more international character. From its birthplaces in Zürich and Geneva it penetrated into France, Holland, Scotland, Hungary, Lithuania, and conquered even the House of Hohenzollern. The relationship between the two confessions, considered from a statistical point of view, has undergone but little change in the last few centuries. The most important alterations perhaps have taken place as a result of the union in the Church of Prussia and of the formation of the Czechoslovak Church of the Czech Brethren. The Reformed faith has been nearly extinguished in Russia where the larger parishes disappeared or were dissolved into Lutheran parishes. In Greece a young Presbyterian church is in the process of formation, and was considerably increased by the emigration of Greek refugees from Anatolia where the Southern Presbyterians had planted a hopeful missionary church.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have witnessed a renaissance of Oriental studies and interest, only to be compared with the classical Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For the Church historian, the two movements must be regarded as counterparts, for while the Renaissance drove men back to the Greek Testament, the oriental renaissance has penetrated to the region behind it. It has, moreover, opened up the whole of the region, which was but dimly reflected and ill-understood by Graeco-Roman writers, between the limits of the oikoumenē of Alexander the Great and those of the Roman Empire.

Disestablishment of the church and religious liberty in Virginia were achievements of the democratic movement of the Revolutionary period, but they were not by any means mere by-products of American independence. It should be remembered that ecclesiastical home-rule had been the forerunner of complete political independence, and that after the famous “Parson's Case” of 1763 colonial autonomy in church affairs was assured. Independence, therefore, did not necessitate disestablishment. In spite of the acute opposition to the Establishment before 1775, due to the rapid spread of the Baptists throughout the state, it was maintained until 1779, its abolition was stubbornly resisted by conservative elements in Virginia, and full religious freedom did not become law until 1786. The solution of the relation of church and state consequently awaited the new order.

The age of Saint Augustine was for the episcopate of the West a period of training for future duties. Before the end of the fifth century, in almost every community the real leader, both in temporal and spiritual matters, was the bishop. During the next two centuries there came into being the medieval prelate, a prince in the church and in the state; but the foundations of his ecclesiastical and civil jurisdiction had already been laid by the early part of the fifth century. The African bishops shared with their colleagues of the other western provinces the same line of evolution, until it was interrupted, first by the Vandal invasion, and then by the Islamic conquest. However, by that time Augustine of Hippo, Alypius of Thagaste, the primate Aurelius of Carthage, and their fellow-bishops had made contributions of permanent value to the whole church, and they had created a noble standard of duty and conduct to be emulated by prelates of a later day.

In the past, church historians have too often neglected the influence of social forces on the development of theological ideas. I propose therefore to study the Tractarians' conception of authority with reference to their social environment rather than with reference to their theological heredity.

The permanence of Protestantism was by no means assured as the year 1530 drew to a close. The Peace of Cambrai had ended the war between the Emperor, Charles V, and the French king, Francis I. Charles likewise had made his peace with the pope. He had gone to Italy and there had received from Clement VII the coveted iron crown of Lombardy. The international situation that had made the Protestants of Germany useful allies of Emperor, king, or pope no longer existed.

With no other country save possibly Italy has the Roman Catholic Church been more closely linked than with Spain. To think Spain was to think Roman Catholicism. Ferdinand and Isabella whom the world remembers best in relation to the discovery of the western world were known as the Catholic kings and their oft expressed motive in the conquest of the new continent was that of extending the holy faith. Mohammedanism with its resistless armies had made heavy inroads upon the Christian world; Luther and his fellow reformers in Germany, France, and Switzerland had wrought still further havoc, separating vast numbers of the faithful from their allegiance to Rome. To Spain and the Spanish monarchs was to belong the glory of restoring, by their zealous conversion of the western peoples, the power and prestige of Rome. In a few short years Spanish conquerors followed by Spanish priests and nuns had planted the cross from Mexico to the southern end of South America.

Since the opening of the century there has been a marked awakening of interest in the works of John Peckham and an increasing appreciation of his importance in many areas of medieval life and thought. As lecturer at Paris and Rome, as Provincial Minister of the Franciscans in England, and as Archbishop of Canterbury, this active and learned scholar devoted his attention to many literary and executive tasks, making substantial contributions in such varied fields as theology, philosophy, religious education, homiletics, canon law, Franciscan history, science, liturgies, and poetry.

The era of the English Reform Bill of 1832 presented difficulties and dangers to both state and church. For the state it set the task of achieving a social order—of forming a new social mind—in a period when social change had destroyed the basis of custom in English life and thought. The rise and growth of mechanized industry had produced both a new working class separated from the land and the processes of production and with only its labor to sell in return for a meager livelihood, and a new industrial middle class which, finding itself excluded from the rights and privileges of the state, had set about the task of acquiring a political position comparable to its new economic status. Though the latter group secured the passage of the Reform Bill, to secure social stability was a much more difficult task. The industrial society showed itself as a divided society, described by Disraeli as “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy … as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets,” a society in whose towns a French writer of the period could discover “nothing but masters and operatives.”

Although Frederick Denison Maurice, from about 1853 until his death in 1872, was frequently spoken of as a member of the Broad-Church school in the Church of England, and was considered by some of his contemporaries both the founder of that school and the greatest of the Broad-Churchmen, and although he is today usually referred to as a leader of the Broad-Church movement, his relation to it was not simple. He himself steadfastly refused to accept the label of “Broad-Churchman” for himself and to admit the need for a Broad-Church party. What the school stood for is as elusive of definition, furthermore, as his own thought was complex. Yet the question, in spite of its difficulty, is well worth going into, since its exploration serves to illustrate not only the difference between conservatism and liberalism, but also the differences between some of the forms of liberalism within itself. A satisfactory answer to the question would also do much to make clear the meaning and the nature of the Broad-Church movement.

Among the frontier ministers who contended “earnestly for the faith once delivered,” Joshua L. Wilson stands well to the front. He was born in Bedford County, Virginia, Sept. 22, 1774; and died in Cincinnati, Ohio, August 14, 1846. His father was Henry Wright Wilson, a grandson of Major Josiah Wilson of Maryland. His mother was an elder sister of Drury Lacy, a well-known Presbyterian minister of Virginia. Wilson's father married Agnes Lacy in Chesterfield County, Virginia, on April 7, 1765. Joshua was the third child and second son. At the time of his birth the family had moved to Bedford County, where Henry Wright Wilson practiced his profession of physician. His career was cut off by death when Joshua was about four years old, and the family was left in needy circumstances. Wilson tells us in his Memoirs that his mother soon married again “with a hope of obtaining a better home.” Her second husband was John Templin, an elderly Presbyterian farmer of the neighborhood. He was living with his only son by a former marriage, Terah. The latter was probably the first Presbyterian to preach the Gospel in Kentucky. After he lost his fiancée by an early death, his father and David Rice, his minister in Bedford County, persuaded him to study for the ministry. At the time of Wilson's birth David Rice was preaching near his home, and Terah Templin was preparing to become a minister. Although his mother was a Baptist, the religious atmosphere thrown about Wilson was Presbyterian.

It is an interesting matter of conjecture just how long it would have taken for John the Baptist to transfer the leadership of the religious group which he founded to Jesus, if John had kept free from the toils of the Roman law and Herod had not set him aside. Judging by the persistence of the John cult among the churches of the East we may believe that the process would have been slow. Just so the modern missionary, whose era may be dated during the past one hundred and fifty years, although he has always announced that his rôle was that of John the Baptist, has nevertheless moved slowly in helping the national leaders to “increase” while he “decreased.”

Among the Catholic clergy of the North before the Civil War, we may look to John Hughes, Irish archbishop of New York, for the frankest exposition of slavery views. Intellectually honest and fearlessly impulsive in the expression of opinion, he was known for his forceful personality and for the leadership he had won by his militant championship of unpopular causes.