John McNeill was a warm and gracious man who was bound to friends, relatives, students in human ways which cannot be easily summarized. We do well to remember thankfully what he meant and means for us and the scholarly world in his achievement as a church historian.

In the thirteenth century the Roman papacy, despite an outward appearance of strength, faced a severe struggle for survival. Within Catholic Europe itself, the Hohenstaufen and their allies questioned clerical prerogatives and, as a result, often suffered excommunication and anathema. In southern France and northern Italy the alarming growth of heresy threatened to detach a significant area of Europe from allegiance to Rome. Simultaneously, a Mongol army menaced Europe's eastern flank, while the Crusader states were soon to fall again into Moslem hands. In Italy papal involvement in communal politics fanned suspicion and distrust of clerical motives. Within the church itself, debate raged between conservatives and radicals, contemplative and active orders, concerning the best means of combatting these threats while fulfilling the Christian Gospel.

The seventeenth-century Netherlands was the Puritan refuge. Its easy accessibility for radical English Puritans caused many a mishap in the plans of the bishops as they enforced conformity in England. When the going became too rough at home, nonconforming ministers could jump across to Holland, rather than obediently submit to discipline, and there carry on their defiant ways. Especially in the 1620s and 1630s, William Laud and others of the English hierarchy exerted themselves mightily to stamp out the Puritan outposts abroad; for Puritanism in exile provided a splendid habitation for all kinds of schemes.Initially going back into the sixteenth century, the Brownists were the main English religious settlers abroad, raising up their own churches and print shops in Amsterdam, Leiden and Middelburg; but in the several decades leading up to the English Civil Wars—in the great days of Archbishop Laud and Bishop Wren—mainstream, non-separating Puritans also were going over, providing strong leadership for most of the English churches in the Netherlands and serving as chaplains for the English regiments, even organizing themselves into an English Classis (1621–1635).

The period 1638–1651 saw the first major purges of the ministry of the reformed kirk in Scotland since the Reformation. These were the forerunners of the later great purges associated with the Restoration (of monarchy and episcopacy) in the 1660s and with the Revolution and re-establishment of presbyterianism in 1688–1690. Before 1638, for all the conflicts within the kirk and in its relations with the state, deposition of ministers had been rare. J. K. Hewison's estimate of 49 deprivations or depositions in 1560–1638 is probably too low, but is of the right order. No detailed study of depositions under the covenanters has ever been made. Hewison calculated that 138 ministers were deprived in the whole of the period 1638–1660. but this figure is far too low. More recentestimates (again covering 1638–1660) of about 200, and of about 210 depositions come much nearer the truth, but they also are too low; there were more depositions than this even in 1638–1651. Considering the importance attached to the depositions after 1660 and after 1688 as indicating the acceptability to ministers of the religious changes then introduced and the extent of persecution, it is rather surprising that so little attention has been paid to the predecessors of these purges— though James Bulloch's two useful local studies of depositions do cover the whole of the seventeenth century.

The Reformation of the sixteenth century dealt a heavy blow to the historic episcopal government of the church. Only two of the national churches which embraced the Protestant Reformation succeeded in retaining their old primatical sees and episcopal polity: the Church of England and the Church of Sweden-Finland. For centuries before the Reformation, the Finnish church had been ecclesiastically part of the province of Uppsala (an archbishopric since 1164) just as Finland itself was politically part of the Kingdom of Sweden. Thus there was no need to establish a Finnish archdiocese while union with Sweden continued. But with Napoleon's concurrence (the Tilsit pact of 1807), the Russians invaded Finland in 1808 and met with such success that all Finland was ceded by Sweden to Russia in 1809.

The concept of a cultural whole is a very fruitful idea for the cultural historian. Involved in it is the assumption that a unity of form pervades the entire culture and that each significant part of the culture—religious, political, social, literary, and so forth—participates in and gives expression to this pervasive form. The assumption is clearly one of great practical importance, for it invites the historian to believe that a close study of one part will throw light upon all others. Accordingly, the present study seeks, by special focus on one aspect of evangelical thought, to help elucidate the pervasive liberal outlook of midnineteenth-century America.

In an essay of the early 1920s, the Swiss theologian Emil Brunner offered alternative phrasings for the Protestant liberalism against which his generation was in revolt: one could speak of “the evolutionistic optimism of world-betterment,” or simply of “Christian Americanism.”

To its leaders the Oxford Movement was “the Romance of the nineteenth century” while to its opponents it was nothing less than “disloyalty to Christ and His Truth.” Then, as now, the chief difficulty lay in delineating various characteristics, and this is especially the case with the Anglo-Catholic or “Ritualist” clergy by the end of the Victorian era. The following will be an attempt to place the phenomenon of Anglo-Catholicism, or Ritualism, into its proper historical context while examining more closely its role within the Oxford Movement and especially its tradition of the “slum priest.”