IN the broadest meaning of the word, the “chaplain” has been with the armies of the world since men first went to war. Whenever men have recognized the gods or God in intertribal and international disagreement, the representatives of supernatural power have been among the soldiers.

We are becoming very familiar with the dictum that August, 1914, marked the close of an age, and that, since the Armistice, we are living in an entirely new world. Everything is changing, and it is beyond the wit of man to forecast the resultant social, economic, political and religious order. Of course, all pursuits are affected by this prodigious shifting of the human outlook, and it seemed as if it would be appropriate to this annual meeting of the American Society of Church History if I should devote the time given to the preliminary address to an attempt to appraise briefly the influence of the Great War upon the studies to which we are devoted.

Looking over the published proceedings of our Society, I find no mention of the reading of a paper dealing with what is the occupation of about half of our members, the teaching of Church History. Discussions of this subject are recorded, but no formal treatment. Therefore, it has seemed not inappropriate to consider in this address some questions which constantly present themselves in the daily work of many here present. Our business is teaching Church History, and with almost all it is this teaching as a part of the training of men for the Christian ministry. Were there no such training, there would be little teaching of the subject to which our Society is devoted. The raîson d'être of our teaching must vitally affect it. We are bound by every sort of obligation to keep always in view the practical purpose which gives us being as teachers.

TO define anything in these days is an unpopular task. To define is to limit, and we are to-day impatient of limits of any kind. The vast expansion of our outlook resulting from a world-shaking political upheaval has reacted upon our social, our economic and our philosophic thought. We respond as seldom before, to every manner of high, generous, broad, liberal suggestions. We repel as unworthy of such spacious days whatever suggests narrowness, commonplaceness, selfishness. We forget easily that breadth may be purchased at a sacrifice of depth, loftiness at the price of a solid footing upon the earth, and generosity by throwing away the things that make us strong for righteous dealing.

In Pennsylvania, foremost of the primitive commonwealths of the United States in presenting conditions favorable to many kinds of undertakings, Moravians effected their first permanent settlements in America. William Perm had contemplated as his “holy experiment” a Quaker colony within which all religions should be tolerated. The scheme of peace with freedom, however, very soon produced a condition of turmoil. At the outset, co-religionists of the founder came to Pennsylvania in such numbers as to give them preponderance in the affairs of the colony. Then, in response to the generous offers of Penn, that Teutonic immigration began which threatened, at one time, to make Perm's colony alien from his countrymen. These emigrants to the colony did not come from those parts of Europe where the Christians were all of one way of worshipping. They were persecuted refugees of all sorts. For the most part, they held the idea that religious liberty was the greatest boon to be sought. But they were not capable of using it peaceably. Accustomed to look upon all authority in state or church as tyranny, they fell readily under the influence of agitators and adventurers who could not be kept out of the Province and whose presence caused Pennsylvania to be somewhat intemperately called “the greatest refuge for pirates and rogues in Ameri-ca.” Confusion and strife resulted and prevailed most conspicuously in the domain of religion.

Church councils have played a great rô1e in ecclesiasti-cal history. Whether their actual influence has been as great upon the development of the Church is a question open to discussion. Nevertheless Nicæa, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon will always stand as landmarks in the development of theology and the constitution of the Church. Apart from these great gatherings, held only on special occasions and at irregular and long intervals, there were other church councils which formed, in design at least, a permanent and important part of ecclesiastical governmental machinery. These were the provincial and diocesan synods or councils, held respectively by the archbishop for his province and the bishop for his diocese. In them much of the orderly administration of a well-governed diocese took place.

By many scientists as well as by the pragmatist philos-ophers we are told that the best, if not the only possible, test of a given thing is what it does. From physics we learn that whereas the nature of matter or of electricity defies definition, it is possible to describe the operation or effect that each has. In a book of economics I have read the definition “money is what money does.” Apparently the same test must be applied to historical phenomena. If we would know the real nature of a given invention or a new ideal we must inquire exactly what was the change in human life that it introduced. It is this test that I propose to apply to the Reformation. I propose to show that of seven great changes which came over the people of Western Europe in the sixteenth century the Reformation was the ideal expression; in part effect, in part cause, in part so intimately connected with some social, philosophical, political or economic movement, that it is hard to say which it is.

I was moved to investigate the subject of this study by an admiration of long standing for John Wyclif, and by the feeling that James Gairdner, the latest historian of Lollardy, had done scant justice to the religious movement that began with Wyclif, and that survived through a century and a half to lend powerful aid to Henry VIII, when the hour struck for the rejection of the Roman jurisdiction. When the work was finished, I found myself at a goal not far removed from that of Dr. Gairdner, although I had reached it with less reluctant feet. Dr. Gairdner had the spirit of the true archivist.1 He had no aversion to dust; he could endure even dirt; but disorder, never. And Lollardy, in English society in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, was a source of disorder. I do not revolt at disorder when great changes are necessary. Unlike Dr. Gairdner, I can find great uses for the man who “refused to recant or bow to the opinion of trained judges,” even though they “presumably understood such questions better than himself.” I cannot view the literature of Lollardy, admittedly crude, as “poisonous.” And I respectfully dissent from the view that an admission of the right of sects to exist is “fatal to the essence of Christianity itself.” But I have found ever increasing reason to concur in the conclusion to which Dr. Gairdner's unrivalled knowledge led him, viz., that Lollardy survived through the troubled days of the fifteenth century to “help Henry VIII put down the Pope,” that Henry's reformation of the Church was “precisely on Lollard lines,” and that “Lollardy affected the Church more and more after his death.”

TO our dearly beloved sons, Tatwine and Wigbert, priests, Bernard and Hiedda, Hunfrid and Sturmi, Boniface, servant of the servants of God, eternal salvation in the Lord.