‘Almost everything in him has its roots in Augustine and yet almost nothing is genuinely Augustinian.’ The words are those of Reinhold Seeberg and the subject of the appraisal Gregory the Great (540–90). It is an observation that has a particular validity when applied to Gregory's adaptation of Augustine's material in his doctrine of Purgatory, which is the subject of this article. In his thought about life after death, Gregory adopted Augustine's theological framework at almost every point. Dogmatic questions such as: ‘At or after death, do the redeemed people of God, other than martyrs, need purification to make them fit for the love and presence of their holy Creator and Judge?’; ‘Does prayer for the dead relate to this growth?’; or ‘Is the life-to-come static?’; and ‘How should St Paul's more obscure statements in his First Letter to the Corinthians concerning salvation “yet so as by fire” be interpreted?’ were questions that Augustine had himself inherited and explored with diligence and real coherence. In large measure, Gregory was content to adopt Augustine's solutions. But in matters of detail Gregory departed from his great forebear, and then, significantly, it was to ‘firm-up’ some of Augustine's more cautious pronouncements particularly about the possibility of purgative suffering in the afterlife. In the celebrated phrase of B. J. Kidd, Gregory ‘erected speculation into a certainty’.

In the middle years of the sixteenth century Antwerp reached the zenith of its economic power. With ninety thousand inhabitants it was far from being the largest city in Europe, but its pre-eminence as a centre for European trade was now universally acknowledged. As a money market, commodity market and, above all, as a centre of the cloth trade Antwerp had by 1550 eclipsed its rivals in Flanders and Brabant and made itself indispensable to merchants from all over the continent. Germans made up the largest contingent among Antwerp's foreign merchant community, but there were substantial numbers of both Portuguese, still dominant in the international spice trade, and Italians, who had first introduced the sophisticated financial and accounting techniques which were now developed to a new peak of refinement in Antwerp. The concentration of capital in the city was an inducement to every major banking house to maintain a permanent representation there, as did their most regular clients, the princely houses of Europe. The real foundation of Antwerp's greatness, however, was the trade in English broadcloths, established there since the turn of the century and carried on by an English merchant community that numbered three or four hundred by 1560. All this frenetic economic activity was presided over with studied negligence by the city elders, whose tradition of minimum controls was calculated to avoid alarming an extremely heterogeneous trading community.

In 1644 the Puritan lawyer and parliamentary pamphleteer, William Prynne, voiced a question much on the minds of moderate Puritans: Would not Congregationalism ‘by inevitable necessary consequence subvert…all settled…forms of civil government…and make every small congregation, family (yea person if possible), an independent church and republic exempt from all other public laws’? What made Congregationalism seem so threatening? The calling of the Long Parliament encouraged an efflorescence of Congregational churches throughout England. While differing in many other respects, their members were united in the belief that the true Church consisted of individually gathered, self-governing congregations of the godly. Such a Church was answerable to no other earthly authority. The roots of English Congregationalism extended back to Elizabethan times and beyond. Some Congregationalists, in the tradition of Robert Browne, believed in total separation from the Established Church; others, following the later ideas of Henry Jacob, subscribed to semi-separatism, believing that a godly remnant remained within the Established Church. For semi-separatists some contact with the latter was permissible, as was a loose confederation of gathered churches. During the English civil wars and Interregnum, the Church polity of most leading religious Independents actually was semi-separatist.

Nonconformity was one of the major formative influences on Victorian society in Britain. The census of 1851 revealed that of seven million worshippers attending service on census day roughly half were counted in a nonconformist chapel. Even the Victorian who failed to attend service regularly found it difficult to evade the influence of nonconformity — and the Evangelicalism with which it was most closely —identified — in a society whose very customs, attitudes and even political life were so largely moulded by it. The main physical manifestation of this pervasive influence was the ubiquitious chapel, its most obvious human expression the professional minister. Of the leading nonconformist denominations the Congregationals were served by some 1,400 full-time men in 1847 while the Wesleyan, Primitive, New Connexion and Association Methodists had respectively 1,125, 518, 83 and 91 ministers in 1851.

In 1854, Philip Schaff, professor of church history at Mercersburg Theological Seminary and minister of the German Reformed Church, reported to his denomination on the state of Christianity in America. Although the American Church had many shortcomings, according to Schaff the United States was ‘by far the most religious and Christian country in the world’. Many Protestant leaders, however, took a dimmer view of Christianity's prospects. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a nagging sense prevailed that traditional theology was no longer capable of integrating religion and culture, or piety and intelligence. Bela Bates Edwards, a conservative New England divine, complained of the prevalent opinion ‘that an intellectual clergyman is deficient in piety and that an eminently pious minister is deficient in intellect’. Edwards was not merely lamenting the unpopularity of Calvinism. A Unitarian writer also noted a burgeoning ‘clerical skepticism’. Intelligent and well-trained men who wished to defend and preach the Gospel, he wrote, ‘find themselves struggling within the fetters of a creed by which they have pledged themselves’. An 1853 Memorial to the Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church summed up the doubts of Protestant clergymen when it asked whether the Church's traditional theology and ministry were ‘competent to the work of preaching and dispensing the Gospel to all sorts and conditions of men, and so adequate to do the work of the Lord in this land and in this age’.