Many years ago, almost on my first acquaintance with Calvin, I was impressed by a phrase in that last brief letter of his to his old companion in labor and battle, William Farel:

Live mindful of our union which, as it has been useful to the Church of God, so its fruits await us in heaven.

American Protestants in the early nineteenth century faced intellectual and social challenge which made conspicuous the weakness of their own divided condition. The American Revolution—which was part of a larger upheaval in the Atlantic Community—had spread Enlightenment ideas, with their aggressive attack on orthodoxy. Quite typical was the lament of a convention of Massachusetts Congregational ministers in 1799 over “the present decay of Christian morals and piety, and the awful prevalence of speculative and practical infidelity.” Well before the middle eighteen-thirties the tide of deism had ebbed, but some, like the editors of the new Christian Review, were still building sea walls against it.

Nestorius continues to be a problem for modern historians of doctrine. The Problem arose in the fifth century when the church acting at the Council of Ephesus (431 A.D.) anathematized Nestorius, the Bishop of Constantinople, and pronounced Nestorianism a christological heresy. The decisions of the Council of Ephesus were accepted and re-affirmed at the Fourth (451 A.D.) and Fifth (553 A.D.) Ecumenical Councils. It must be said that “Nestorianism” as a special kind of doctrine could have been condemned as heretical could be called “dyoprosopatism.” But such was not the case. Nestorius was condemned and exiled as a heretic, and he was judged on the basis of certain doctrines which he was accused of holding. From the moment of his excommunication until the present time there have been many expressions of uncertainty as to whether he really taught and believed what was defined and condemned as Nestorianism. Somewhat epigrammatically historians have been asking whether Nestorius himself was a Nestorian.

[The question raised by Jacques Barzun in the following article is one which deserves serious consideration by the American Society of Church History and by all who are concerned with the training of church historians. Far too often we assume that simply to do a little research, or a lot, is enough to create an adequate understanding of the church's past. Dr. Barzun, provost of Columbia University, provokes thought and may even help us use our resources more wisely. The Editors.]

History and church history are disciplines well entrenched in the schools. This means that church historians commonly have an unquestioned place in theological school faculties. Hence there is little incentive for them to become self-conscious or troubled about the reason-for-being either of the discipline or of themselves. Probably church history is always included in the curriculum more from habit than because there is an articulated rationale for it. I dare say that many church historians if asked the question “Why have church history in the curriculums” would reply in effect that its place is obvious, and if one cannot see the obvious it is hopeless to try to explain it to him.

The problem of rendering to God what is God's is no less complex when Caesar is himself a Christian. Among the Anglo-Saxons, for example, “a Christian king is Christ's deputy among Christian people,” but both the royal role in religion and the offerings made to the divine were shaped by the Germanic heathenism which had embraced both. In the full flood of Christian monarchy in England, the ruler still participated in cosmic and earthly realms, a position presaged by that of his pagan ancestors but involving, inevitably, changing forms and problems. The king was still the head of the folk under divine auspices, and a separation of religion and royal function was as unthinkable as under paganism. The English ruler stood in a special relationship to the Divine King, and the doctrine of separation of powers between ruler and Church was as abhorrent to the latter, which had inundated the kingdoms on the tide of royal favor, as it was impracticable to the monarch. The ruler was expected to play a theological and eschatological role for his people. The view of the king as doctor of his folk—the tuba praedicationis, as Alcuin hailed Offa of Mercia—leading them to judgment, cast a religious aura about him which was to continue a ruler-cult in Christian terms.

As we move in this study from Constantius to Henry VIII to John Fitzgerald Kennedy we move in Christian doctrine from heresy to orthodoxy to “American” Catholicism, and in Church-State relations from domination to manipulation to separation or from a form of Caesaro-Papism to Lay State regalism to Lay State separatism of the American type. An important key to understanding these shifts or changes is to be found in a study of the Magistrate's theological conception of the magistrate's office.

The problem of a possible continuity of late medieval heresies and sixteenth century sects in Switzerland and Germany has not been thoroughly investigated yet. Of course some historians have touched upon the problem. Thus in 1886 Ludwig Keller advanced the thesis that Anabaptism was closely connected with the Waldensian tradition. Recently a Marxist historian, Gerhard Zschäbitz, pointed out that certain ideas of the Hussite tradition had infiltrated Anabaptism in Thuringia. On the whole, however, it is assumed that medieval heresies did not survive the fifteenth century. The sixteenth century German sects are considered a product of the Reformation. This is implying that the Reformation constituted a complete break with the past and opened an altogether new age. It hardly needs pointing out that this is a hazardous assumption. It is rather hard to believe that heresies, which had secretly lived on in certain towns and villages for one or two hundred years should suddenly have died out by 1500.

John Campanus was one of the two most notorious Antitrinitarians of northern Europe in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. While, unlike the other, Michael Servetus, he does not seem to have had any lasting marked influence on Antitrinitarian developments, the stir he created among his comtemporaries was considerable. His stature in his own time is partially attested to, albeit negatively, both in a letter of Luther's in 1531 in which he identified Campanus as an adversary of the Son of God who blasphemed Christ even more than Arius had,2 and in the “mild” Melanchthon's opinion— given in response to a statement by Luther that the best way to deal with Campanus was to ignore him—that one should, rather, hitch him to the gallows. Somewhat more positive esteem, on the other hand, is intimated in a letter written to Cardinal Cervini in 1541 by the Catholic reformer Albert Pighius, whose opinion it was of one of Campanus' writings that no other writing of the time, either by a Catholic or a Lutheran, displayed greater erudition and ingenuity.

We are better informed about the outlawed Anabaptist sect than any other religious movement of the sixteenth century. While there is a wealth of material on Luther, we badly lack records of the common people who accepted his doctrines. Paradoxically enough, the richness of Anabaptist sources is due to the very fact that Lutheran, Zwinglian, and Catholic authorities did their utmost to suppress the movement.

Professor Kenneth Scott Latourette has long maintained that church historians must take into account the role that missions have played in ecclesiastical history. His point is especially well taken in considering the Presbyterian Schism of 1837.

In a special advertising supplement to the New York Times (May 6, 1962) the State of Connecticut sponsored an old claim: “The world's first written constitution, creating government by consent of the governed, appeared in Connecticut in 1639.” The diverse implications of this venerable assertion and their relation to the Rev. Thomas Hooker are the subject of the present essay. Intimations that Hooker deserved remembrance as a champion of liberty date at least to William Hubbard's General History of New England, written in the 1670's. But full-blown theories came after 1776, and especially after Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull's discovery in 1860 of a remarkable notebook of sermon notes taken down in cipher between April, 1638, and April, 1641, by Henry Wolcott, Jr. of Windsor. Herein was found an outline of Hooker's now famous sermon to the Connecticut Court on May 31, 1638, as that body began its historic deliberations on a “Frame of Government.” George Bancroft would reflect the impact of this find in the revised edition of his widely read History of the United States. He saw in Hooker's pronouncements the “seed” whence flowered the “first of the series of written American constitutions.” Paraphrasing Ezekiel Roger's epitaph, Bancroft refers to Hooker as “the one rich pearl with which Europe more than repaid America for the treasures from her coast.” John Fiske in his work on The Beginnings of New England (1889) would claim even more stridently that Thomas Hooker “deserves more than any other man to be called the father [of American democracy].” George Leon Walker accepted Fiske's judgment and subtitled his biography “Preacher, Founder, Democrat.”

The journey is long from the Massachusetts theocracy that banished Roger Williams in 1635 to the predominantly Roman Catholic Massachusetts of the twentieth century that finally in 1936 lifted that ancient ban against the original Rhode Islander. The tale of this remarkable transition is the story of how the heretic became the hero. In his own time, Williams had days of agony and glory—mostly the former. Likewise, in the running currents of our national history, his reputation has had days of agony and glory—mostly the latter. This is not to say, however, that he always properly deserved the precise glory given him, or, rather, that he has been invariably lauded for his true contribution.

The Catholic relief act passed by the Irish parliament in 1778 was the first significant breach of that comprehensive system of legal discrimination against Irish Catholics known in the eighteenth century as the Popery laws. The act of 1778 removed virtually all of the legal restrictions respecting the acquisition and free testamentary disposition of landed property imposed on Irish Catholics by the legislators of William III and Anne and formed a powerful precedent for the subsequent acts of 1782 and 1791–93 that repealed discriminatory statutes affecting the Irish Catholic hierarchy, secular clergy, and the Catholic business and professional classes. While most scholars have fully recognized the revolutionary character of this act and have discussed its provisions many times, a mistaken impression that no detailed record of this measure's passage through the Irish house of commons existed has discouraged original research into the complicated set of circumstances surrounding its enactment. Consequently, the relation of the Anglo-American crisis to the cause of Catholic relief, the connection between this particular act and the movement for Irish legislative independence during the later phases of the war for American independence, and the extraordinary arguments and tactics employed by supporters and opponents of the bill in an exclusively Protestant parliament have remained unnoticed.

The present emphasis upon local history as the foundation for a reinterpretation of national events has already affected the historiography of seventeenth century English Puritanism. Attention has been focused on the manuscript records relating to the City of London, many of which had never before been searched by historians, since it was apparent that a reassessment of London's role in the Puritan Revolution was long overdue. The outstanding example of this new approach to the history of London is Valerie Pearl's excellent book, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625–43. In addition, the present writer has described Puritan activities between 1610 and 1640 in the City government and in the parishes of St. Stephen, Coleman Street, and St. Botolph Without Aldgate. Still, a need remains for more detailed knowledge of Puritanism in the City's important corporate groups— not only the governing bodies and the parishes, but also the great London livery companies. The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the story of Puritanism in the Haberdashers' Company, the livery company which seems to have been the most successful in promoting Puritan preaching in England between 1600 and 1640.

When Christian missionaries returned to the Congo in the nineteenth century, all traces of the promising Portuguese missionary effort of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries had been obliterated. The Kingdom of the Congo which had produced several generations of Christian Kings, thousands of converts, even an African clergy and an African Bishop, had been literally swept away by the European slave trade. The Church had paid a heavy price for its failure to restrain the greed of the faithful, and one would scarcely expect to find the error repeated. Furthermore, the intervening centuries had produced in Europe a growth of humanitarian sentiment which had sensitized the Christian conscience to the suffering of the oppressed; indeed this concern for the temporal welfare of the African had been an important factor in the outburst of nineteenth century missionary activity. Yet when this second encounter of European and African produced in the Congo Free State a form of exploitation which rivalled the first in its brutality, dedicated Catholic missionaries and zealous Catholic prelates staunchly defended the regime against the attacks of reformers. The explanation of this melancholy episode appears to lie in the fact that sectarian interest, national loyalty, and an overwhelming faith in the benefits of Europeanization were allowed to obscure the essential facts.

By about 1650, the seventeenth century Puritan search for the New Jerusalem led many an English enthusiast to the conviction that the millennial Kingdom of Christ was at hand. This current in Puritan thought had been gaining force since Thomas Brightman wrote his exegesis on Revelation at the beginning of the century. With the coming of the civil war, the trickle begun by Brightman (and taken up by a few others before 1642) soon developed into a major stream. John Archer, Robert Maton, Jeremiah Burroughes, and William Bridge, to name but some, penned works that increased interest and heightened expectation in the subject during the decade of the forties. The infection even caught John Milton who briefly seemed convinced that the great millennial age was imminent.

The student of Wyclif's work soon learns that communion with the master is only one of his rewards, and that it is well worth his while to cultivate an acquaintance with the editors, whose prefaces are not only filled with useful information but often adorned with bits of wisdom, expressions of devotion to the cause, and other items of a more poignant character. It is interesting, for example, to speculate about the identity of Reginald Lane Poole's slovenly copyist, whose faults are so devastatingly exposed in the preface to De dominio divino. And it is more than interesting to learn, from Rudolf Buddensieg's preface to the Polemical Works, that in 1880 the Delegates of the Oxford University Press refused to publish them; one may agree with Buddensieg that as of that date England was ungratefully remiss in her debt to “the memory of one of her greatest men.” Fortunately the Wycliff Society was formed in 1882 to remedy the lack, and in the short space of thirty years managed to publish almost all of the religio-political works, in about twenty-five volumes, and a number of the philosophical works as well. The collaboration between English and German scholars that made this success possible is amply attested in the prefaces, even down to the inevitable German claim, based to be sure on fact, that they had done the bigger share. Just as well, perhaps, if Buddensieg was right when he judged that “to edit mediaeval texts critically is work not very familiar to English scholars.”

Commenting upon Neville Chamberlain's announcement of war to the British people on September 3, 1939, Frederick Lewis Allen remarked, “With these sentences, spoken so quietly thousands of miles away, an era ended for America and another began.” Sufficient time has now elapsed for historians to analyze and appraise the events which informed and circumscribed that past era. Two articles have recently appeared in this journal substantiating such a conclusion. In his article dealing with “Continental Influence on American Christian Thought Since World War I,” Professor Sydney Ahlstrom forcefully argued that the most significant points of contact between the altered theological situation on the Continent and America's post-liberal thinking were four in number and scope: 1) a new movement in biblical exegesis and interpretation; 2) the German social movement; 3) the Swedish movement in theology; and 4) the “crisis theology” or dialectical school associated with Karl Barth. Without taking issue here with Ahlstrom as to the correctness or adequacy of his delineation of these times as “post-liberal” (in itself a somewhat unattached and ambiguous term), I would like to record those same points of contact within and from the perspective of American Methodism.