The bicentennial of the American Bill of Rights offers an appropriate occasion to reassess its intellectual heritage. British radicals, I will argue, had a major impact on the principles enunciated in the Bill of Rights, including the rarely cited ninth amendment, so crucial for the resolution of such sociolegal issues as the rights to life and privacy and the place of religion in society. By radicals I mean those who sought fundamental changes in politics, religion, society, or the economy by striking at the root of contemporary assumptions and institutions.

For both Schaff and Nevin, while they were colleagues at Mercersburg, the issue of issues in mid-nineteenth century America as well as in Continental Europe and in England, was “the church question.” This subject has already been provided a seminal treatment by James H. Nichols to which all later students of Mercersburg Theology are deeply indebted. The purpose of this article is to attempt to shed new light on this question by focusing upon what was for both of them a critical ecclesiological issue, one upon which they in part agreed and in part disagreed—namely, the question of historical development. It is this issue which I believe especially provoked Nevin's theological crisis. This essay will also seek to describe Schaff's role in this crisis.

In the 1840s, Laura Bridgman, a teenage girl from a New Hampshire village, was among the most famous women in the Western world. Thomas Carlyle called her life story “one of the most beautiful phenomena at present visible under our Sun.” British intellectuals, including the novelist Charles Dickens, the geologist Charles Lyell, and the phrenologist George Combe considered a visit with Laura Bridgman an important stop on their much publicized American tours. Dickens devoted fifteen pages of his American Notes to describing his visit with her, and Combe reported that “Laura Bridgman is very much admired by the British public, and her case is universally attractive. It is spoken of with deep interest and admiration in every society into which I enter.” Journals on both sides of the Atlantic published annual updates on her life, periodic chapters in a biography hailed as a tale “of thrilling interest, not surpassed by those of the novelist.”

Between May 1875 and December 1879, Vincent van Gogh's life was marked by a devout evangelical piety, distinctly different from what had gone before. Although raised in a religious family, his father a Dutch Reformed minister in the Groningen tradition, van Gogh barely mentions religion in his early letters. His religious fervor deepened considerably, however, sometime during 1875, while he was living in Paris. Van Gogh's letters dating from May 1875 are increasingly filled with biblical quotations and religious reflections. His sister-in-law, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, in describing van Gogh's character during this period wrote, “that was Vincent's aim—to humble himself, to forget himself, ‘mourir à soi-meme,’ (to sacrifice every personal desire), that was the ideal he tried to reach as long as he sought his refuge in religion, and he never did a thing by halves.”

“Women go to church for the same reason that farmers and convicts go to church,” H.L. Mencken once observed—strictly for the company. His book “in defense of women,” written at the close of World War I, systematically deflated the Victorian era's sentimental notions about the “fairer sex.” “They are growing less and less religious as year chases year,” he noted cheerfully. “The evangelical Protestant denominations will have a hard time holding them.” Others shared Mencken's conclusion, though less joyfully. “Women no longer accept Christianity as a matter of course because they happen to be women,” the Christian Century lamented in 1924. “They pause and question here as in all things else.”