Nothing is as problematic in contemporary work on the early Christian Church as Orthodoxy. P. Henry's 1980 conference paper ‘Why is contemporary scholarship so enamoured of ancient heretics?’ outlined the situation, saying, ‘we have moved from historical criticism through historical even-handedness to historical advocacy. The historian is not content to assure the heretics a fair hearing; the historian has become an advocate in their cause. We have done an about-face from Tertullian's De praescriptione haereticorum to De praescriptione patrum’. From ‘ruling-out-of-court of the heretics’ to, in Henry's phrase, ‘ruling-out-of-court of the Fathers’.

There is an element of drama in Anselm's description of the Synod of Reims in 1049 as the assembled bishops are asked to swear before the relics of St Remi that they had not achieved their positions in the Church through simony. The tension mounts as the archbishop of Reims excuses himself from the oath and asks for a private audience with the pope. Of the twenty bishops present, four confessed involvement with simony. One bishop, Hugh of Langres, accused of a long list of crimes in addition, fled the scene rather than submit to Leo IX's justice. However, of all the bishops implicated in the crime of simony, only one was deposed outright: Budic of Nantes, as the narrator of the acts of the synod tersely states:

Finally, the bishop of Nantes came and confessed that his father was the bishop of his civitas and during his life he had received the gift of the episcopate and when he died he took his place for a payment of money. Because of this, by the judgement of the synod, he was deprived of his episcopal ministry. His pastoral staff and ring having been taken away, the office of priest alone was given to him through the intervention of the bishops.

Much attention has been paid to the role and functions of the mendicant orders in their urban environment. Among the topics discussed have been the friars' importance for urban development, their coexistence with other religious institutions, their economic practices and their relations with the secular authorities. As far as their spiritual and social significance is concerned their spectacular success and rapid development in the thirteenth century are generally accepted. There were some setbacks, particularly in towns where the Dominicans or Franciscans became involved in the suppression of heresy, but these had little impact on the rapid expansion of the orders. Members from all social groups, academics as well as aristocrats, merchants and artisans as well as the poor, felt the attraction of their sermons and way of life, some to such an extent that they decided to join one of the orders. But while the attraction of the mendicant ideal in the decades following the friars' arrival is undisputed, the problem of their importance for the religious life of the late medieval urban population is far more difficult to discuss. While there are assertions that the friars remained particularly popular, the orders' decline and their need of reform were already obvious in the fourteenth century and the various efforts to bring about a reinvigoration confirm this impression. In the fifteenth century famous mendicant preachers from Vincent Ferrer and Bernardino of Siena to Girolamo Savonarola attracted large crowds in many parts of Europe, but was this indicative of the population's general attitude towards the orders? Were the mendicants still perceived by the people as responding to their spiritual needs? How did the public react to signs of decadence, to disputes among the brothers? A general answer to such questions needs to be based on a large number of local studies and this is still a task for the future.

The two hundred or so evangelical clergymen who seceded from the Church of England into Protestant Dissent during the first half of the nineteenth century often paid a considerable price for their action. By crossing the subtle social boundary between Anglican priesthood and Nonconformist ministry they forfeited status and often, no doubt, income. A number vanished into comparative obscurity as pastors of small chapels, whether as ministers of a major denomination, Strict and Particular Baptists, Christian Brethren, or preachers in some unlabelled and impoverished chapel. If not so severely penalised for their secession as many of their colleagues who went to Rome, particularly those with wives for whom entry into the Roman priesthood was closed, they usually came off the worse in temporal terms for following the dictates of conscience. This, no doubt, they fully anticipated. What was not anticipated, however, was the imposition of a legal penalty for their act of secession. Though Anglican secessions to Rome or Dissent were not infrequent, their legality was apparently seldom if ever questioned. Liberal Churchmen like Theophilus Lindsey, who had abandoned the establishment for Unitarianism during the eighteenth century, had set up their chapels with impunity. In 1831 the evangelical William Tiptaft received a threat from Thomas Burgess, the bishop of Salisbury, upon seceding from the parish of Sutton Courtney, Berkshire, but nothing came of it. Those who left the via media for Rome were assumed to be acting within the framework of the law when they took up a new ministry as priests of another apostolic confession.

Early pentecostals thought the world of themselves and they assumed that everyone else did too. Not always positively, of course, but frequently, and with secret envy. In one sense it is difficult to imagine how pentecostals could have been more wrong. Till the 1950s most Americans had never heard of them. A handful of observers within the established Churches noticed their existence, and maybe a dozen journalists and scholars took a few hours to try to figure out why a movement so manifestly backward could erupt in the sunlit progressivism of the early twentieth century. But for the American public as a whole, that was about all there was. In another sense, however, pentecostals' extravagant assessment of their own importance proved exactly right. Radical evangelicals, pentecostals' spiritual and in many cases biological parents, marshalled impressive resources to crush the menace in their midst. Abusive words flew back and forth for years, subsiding into sullen silence only in the 1930s. Things improved somewhat after World War II, but even today many on both sides of the canyon continue to eye the other with fear and suspicion.