“Let, whatsoever I will, be that esteemed a canon.” So retorted the Arianizing Emperor Constantius at the stormy council of Milan in 355 after he had become sole ruler of the Empire and was able to give full expression to his Arian sympathies. Whether Athanasius has accurately recorded his language is not certain; that he has captured the intention of Constantius in a vivid phrase is indisputable. It takes its place alongside James I's summary disposition of the Hampton Court Puritans, “No bishop, no king,” to be set over against another series of resounding affirmations of a contrary significance: Ambrose of Milan's “the emperor is in the Church,” and Andrew Melville's retort to the same James, “Sir, thair is twa Kings and twa Kingdoms in Scotland.”

Of all the nations which during the second World War took up arms against Russia, Finland alone has escaped military occupation and retained her independence. An American visitor to this farthest European out post of Western democracy against Soviet expansion Worship, and of the press, which prevails there, especially when he bears in mind the fate of the nations on the southern side of the Gulf of Finland. The Finns, to be sure, exert every effort to maintain diplomatically “correct” relations with their powerful eastern neighbor. Their most recent treaty of peace with Russia forbids them to enter into foreign alliances such as the Atlantic Pact Which are objectionable to the Russians, and the Finns realize that their geographical position does not permit them to violate the treaty.

If we are correct in saying that for the Arians the relationship of the Logos-Son to the Father was primarily a cosmological problem and for the Catholics primarily a soteriological problem, we should be able to go on and point to corresponding differences in the liturgical ethos of the rival parties and more specifically to divergent conceptions and practices connected with the Eucharist, resulting from differing conceptions of the role of Logos-Son. We do find, despite the meagre materials on the Arian side, divergent emphases that will be seen to bear on the behavior of the two parties in the ecclesio-political struggle of the fourth century.

Academic history in general, as is well known, straddles the conventional departments of college faculties; it is always a problem whether history should be listed among the social sciences or with the humanities. Clio is traditionally one of the arts, yet historians jealously defend their claims also to critical science. Church history likewise presents these Janus faces to the world; it is at the same time a product of religious imagination and thought and a scientific discipline. May it not be, however, that these two aspects of church history need to be maintained in a certain relation to each other, and that today they are generally imperfectly integrated?

Interpretations of the last book of the New Testament usually dwell upon its visions of things to come. Except for its prayers and hymns, however, little attention has been paid to its liturgical character. This fact is the more surprising since it is just in that respect that the Apocalypse of John differs mostly strikingly from other Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings. Its visions are presented within a framework of liturgical activities, and toward the end of the book it is hardly possible to dissociate the acts of worship from the visions of the future. This close relationship shows that its liturgical portions are not a purely literary device. Rather in the Seer's mind they form part of the revelatory process itself representing the reaction of initiated creatures to the gradual disclosure of the saving purpose of God and its execution. From the historical viewpoint, this liturgical framework of the Apocalypse of John is interesting, because it contains a number of features which, in a similar manner, occur also in the liturgies of the Ancient Church. Thus it is from the liturgical character of the Apocalypse that the historical development of the Christian liturgy becomes intelligible. Out of the perplexing diversity of its types, the formative principle of its early stages emerges, and a number of motives become visible, some of which have determined its history to the present day. Others, which have no longer a vital role assigned to them, were, nevertheless, preserved on account of the significance originally attached to them. Among these features I mention the ideas of the Eucharistic Parousia, the Church's participation in the angelic worship, the emphasis placed upon the worthiness of the interpreter of Scripture, the connection between the Confession of Sins and the Eucharist, the separation of the believers and unbelievers prior to the heavenly meal, the celebration of the Eucharist as an act of the Church in its cosmic totality, the association of the Eucharist with the Judgment of the World, and the interpretation of the liturgy as a spiritual battle. It will suffice to single out two of these features, which for their lack of centrality in the liturgies are particularly apt to illustrate our point, viz. the participation of the Church in the angelic worship, and the worthiness of the interpreter of Scripture.

When one mentions the “liturgy” or “Liturgical Movement” a variety of strange or confusing pictures is likely to be raised in a person's mind: the hearer may have passed through some unfortunate experience and thereby acquired what he calls “anti-liturgical inclinations;” he may have visions of vestments, gestures, or ceremonies which he finds difficult to follow; he may even be ready to dismiss everything liturgical as exhibiting “Catholicizing tendencies.”

The first fleeting glimpse we have of the shadowy figure of Amalarius is one of him as a youth in the city of Tours at the monastic school of Saint Martin under the careful tuition of Alcuin, the most learned teacher in the Carolingian realm. The last we hear of him, many years later, is a bitter remark that by his words and books he had infected and corrupted almost all the churches within and beyond France and that his writings should have been destroyed after his death. Both the date and the place of the beginning and the end of his life are unknown, and even his full name is uncertain—some have called him Amalarius Fortunatas; others, Symphosius Amalarius. Yet this man, whom J.-K. Huysmans called “the most ancient of the liturgists,” played a vital role in the busy years of the first half of the ninth century.

A student of the history of Oriental Christianity is particularly fascinated by the role Syrian monasticism has played, not only in the religious, ecclesiastical, spiritual, literary, and cultural life of the Christian Syrians, but also far outside the confines of the territory of Aramean Christianity. To be sure, Syrian monasticism has been exaggeratedly ascetic. But paradoxically, the same psyche which has passionately longed for mortification and relentless chastisement has showed a remarkable flexibility. It has released energies to direct them towards various tasks which serve the Christian community, proving its sympathetic and even warm participation in the multifarious responsibilities of human life. Its missionary activities, zeal and enthusiasm to reach faraway countries are well-known. Its achievements, particularly in Eastern Asia, are admirable. What the bilingual monument of Si-nganfu has immortalized is only one luminary among other achievements which probably have not been carved in stone so explicitly. Other aspects are no less important. In one study I have already sketched the profile of Syrian monasticism in the light of philanthropic activities in Mesopotamia and Persia. I have also had the opportunity to show its share in the history of education and schools, learning and literary life, and even in the history of the New Testament text. The traces which have been left behind are not traces in sand, but have been carved in human hearts. These traces are still visible to anyone who studies the history, literature and mythology of the nations in Middle and Eastern Asia. These are only the most important aspects amongst others, which depict peculiar features in the physiognomy of Syrian monasticism.

It is one of the peculiarities of the writing of Protestant church history that the history of Christian missions since the Reformation plays a very unimportant part within the general historical scene. The religious and theological conflicts on the European continent and the beginnings of churches in North America have claimed all the interest of the historians so that the history of missions has appeared to be a kind of subordinate subject. The reason for this underemphasizing of the history of Protestant missions is first of all the fact that there existed, as a kind of insuperable prejudice, the opinion that the Reformers—Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and Zwingli—were not interested at all in Christian missions. Only the latest turn of clesiastical historiography has included Christian missions again in general church history and put them in the place which they deserve.

In the century from 1750 to 1850, to use a phrase of Whitehead, there was a change in the “climate of opinion” in the Western World. Men ventured upon new paths with new methods of investigation and new tests of reality. A score of epoch-making books appeared between Rousseau's Social Contract and Emile, 1762, on the one hand, and Comte's Positive Philosophy, 1853, and Spencer's earliest writings on the other. John Fiske said: “In their mental habits, in their methods of inquiry and in the data at their command, the men of the present day who have fully kept pace with the scientific movements are separated from the men whose education ended in 1830 by an immeasurably wider gulf than has ever divided one progressive generation of men from their predecessors.” This change of viewpoint and method of approach to reality involved both intellectual disintegration and theological reconstruction.

Toward the close of the fourteenth century the Dutch mystic and revival preacher Gerhard Groote inaugurated in the Low Countries the religious movement known as the Devotio Moderna or the New Piety. Forced into silence by his enemies among the clergy, the popular preacher was devoting himself to the problems of giving permanent form and organization to his scattered groups of followers when death prematurely ended his career in 1384. But the small circles of pious men and women who under his inspiration had begun to practice the common life in imitation (so they believed) of the Christians of New Testament times, found a capable leader in Florentius Radewyns, the trusted friend and disciple of Groote and the leader of the Deventer circle of Groote's followers. In 1386 some of this group, with Rade-wyn's approval, founded the monastery of Windesheim, near Zwolle. This act constituted a definite division of the Devotio Moderna into two branches. One, with Windesheim as center, became monastic in character and was knolwn after 1395 as the Congregation of the Augustinian Canons Regular of Windesheim, The other, which reflected more nearly the ideals of Groote, continued the non-monastic traditions of the parent house in Deventer and took the name of the Brethren of the Common Life. The Congregation of Windesheim spread rapidly and numbered in the course of the fifteenth century many houses in the Low Countries and in Germany. The Brethren of the Common Life, on the other hand, because of their refusal to take monastic vows and because of their insistence upon manual labor as the chief means of financial support, encountered determined opposition from the regular clergy and therefore could not rival the development of their more acceptable brothers of Windesheim.

After the Calas Case of 1762–64 the more severe of the anti-Protestant laws fell into disuse. Raids on the open-air religious meetings ceased; few if any clergy were executed; no laity were sent to the galleys; and no property apparently was seized. The Protestant pastors became bolder and, in the 1780's, Paul Rabaut and his son Rabaut Saint-Etienne, the two foremost of them all, lived without disguise and without molestation as they served their flock in the city of Nîmes. The pastor Frossard, whose name has passed down to us as the author of an able antislavery pamphlet, worked without harm in Lyons, where he was visited by Brissot in 1782. Court de Gebelin, son of the daring pastor Antoine Court and himself a pastor, lived openly in Paris from 1763 to 1784 without annoyance, became secretary of the celebrated Freemason's Lodge of the Nine Muses frequented by Voltaire and Franklin, and acquired some reputation as a writer and scholar. And when at length he died (in 1784) his funeral was unmolested, and Quesnay de SaintGermain, a councillor at the Parlement of Paris, and the pastor Rabaut Saint-Etienne addressed the assemblage. Even earlier, in 1748, Simon Louis de Ry, son of a Protestant refugee at Cassel, came to Paris and studied architecture. Either the government did not know or care who he was. Likewise his sister, married to a French Protestant refugee named Le Clerc, returned to Paris for a period of three months in 1773 without molestation. The Protestant physician Paul Bosc went to Paris in the 1750's and not only lived untroubled but even became a court physician, a member of the Academy of Sciences, and was sent on a government mission to England. He died a noted scientist in 1784. As a youth he had even been a Protestant pastor. What did that matter? Paris did not care. Paris throughout the eighteenth century was perhaps the safest place for a Protestant in France.

This paper is limited to a brief critique of current opinion regarding the state of learning in Austria about 1300, to a survey of the most important recent developments in the study of the subject, and to suggestions for future study.

It has been the peculiar lot of Puritanism that, while most men will agree that its influence—good or evil—upon Anglo-Saxon culture and history has been profound, yet great disagreement exists as to just what Puritanism was, how it began, and what aspects of traditional Anglo-Saxon thought and life are traceable to Puritanism. The most common view is that Puritanism was imported into England from Calvinistic Geneva by the returning Marian exiles. This view must then go on to account for the many non-Calvinistic elements in the Puritanism of the Civil War era. Another school of thought has sought to identify Puritanism with the beginnings of democratic political, social and economic ideals during the Tudor-Stuart era. Almost diametrically opposed to this is yet another school of thought which finds in Puritanism an ultra-rightist authoritarianism in theology and politics, and the seed-bed of an unbridled and Pharisaical capitalism. Still others see in Puritanism the long hard travail which gave birth to the ideal of complete freedom for the individual in all phases of life. Of necessity, each of these interpretations, and others not here mentioned, has sought to ground itself in the history of the English Reformation, and so we have many quite different accounts of the origins and history of Puritanism.

The Great Awakening of 1740–41, which set for a century and a half the basic patterns of American revivalist religion, was itself shaped by earlier outpourings of the Spirit. The most influential of these was undoubtedly the revival of 1734–35 in Jonathan Edwards' congregation at Northampton, a revival which spread widely in western Massachusetts and even south into Connecticut. Edwards' preaching methods were copied and his congregation's conversion experiences emulated not only in the immediate revival but, through Edwards' Faithful Narrative of them, in the Whitefield and subsequent awakenings. The Northampton awakening had been in process of preparation for two or three years under Edwards' preaching. But its first overt manifestation coincided with Edwards' two lectures on justification by faith alone, sermons preached avowedly against Arminianism and in spite of the warnings and censure of some of his influential kinsmen.

In 1685 the government of Louis XIV revoked the vestiges of the Edict of Nantes, after having made various encroachments on it since the 1630's when Richelieu nullified the military provisions. And thus France, which under Henry IV in the late sixteenth century had gone farther toward legal toleration than the other states of Europe, lapsed into the ranks of those intolerant. The Edict had never been popular with a large element of the French people, notably the group which had fought under the Guises in the Wars of Religion. The clergy in particular urged its repeal. Louis XIII and Louis XIV under the influence of his Jesuit advisors, Pères Le Tellier and La Chaise, and of his second wife, Madame de Maintenon, a zealous ex-Protestant, revoked the Edict completely.

At the time of Clement of Alexandria there existed two theories with regard to the generation of the Logos. They may be described as the twofold stage theory and the single stage theory. According to the twofold stage theory, which reflects a similar conception in Philo,1 the Logos at first existed from eternity in God and then, prior to the creation of the world, it was generated from the essence of God as a distinct personal being. Representatives of this view are, among the Greek Fathers, Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Hippolytus, and among the Latin Fathers, Tertullian, Novatian, Lactantius, and as late as the fourth century, Zeno of Verona. According to the single stage theory, the generation of the Logos from God was from eternity. The first to introduce this view were Irenaeus and Origen and it is this view which ultimately prevailed. Now with regard to Clement of Alexandria, who was a contemporary of both Irenaeus and Origen, it is the general opinion of students of the history of doctrine that he is to be included among those who introduced the single stage theory, though Zahn finds that Clement “always makes a sharp distinction between the only Unbegotten God the Father and the Son or Logos who was begotten or created before the rest of creation.”2 It is this general opinion which I wish to question in this paper.