By the thirteenth century, Latin Christians had been dispensing and collecting indulgences for two centuries. Though indulgentia was a relatively late term, and first the favorite of thirteenth-century Dominican theologians, remissions of temporal penalty for sin had been granted since the eleventh century, whether they were known as remissiones or relaxationes, the two most popular terms of eleventh- and twelfth-century ecclesiastics. Bishops granted partial indulgences for visitations of holy places. Partial indulgences remitted a fraction of all penalty incurred through sin. Contributions to pious works, such as church, hospital, or bridge constructions, were also rewarded with indulgences. Other prelates granted indulgences until Lateran IV. The popes granted both partial and plenary indulgences (those which remitted all penalty for having sinned). They granted partial indulgences for much the same reasons as other bishops. Plenary indulgences were almost exclusively granted to crusaders or contributors to crusades.

With the publication of his Den Byencorf der H. Roomische Kercke (The Beehive of the Holy Roman Church) in 1569, the Netherlandic Calvinist Marnix of Saint Aldegonde launched a satirical attack onthe clergy, polity, and sacramental practice of Catholicism. Though the fame of the book and its author have been eclipsed, they were both well known during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesas shown by the frequency of publication. Marnix's task, in common with other sixteenth-century religious propagandists, was to communicate a theological message to a popular audience. The success of this effort depended on reaching across the separation between systematic theology and folk religiosity. The object was not original theology, nor even doctrinal subtleties, but the creativeuse of common terms to explain divergent schemes of basic dogma. Because the subject was more religious than theological, the separation between Latin and the vernacular cultures could be bridged by the use of metaphors common to both high and popular culture. In this, Marnix's work is distinguished by his use of the metaphors of beehive, honey, and manna to explain the differences between the Catholic Eucharist and the Calvinist Lord's Supper. The use of manna is not surprising as one would expect it to be a common image; however, the metaphors of hive and honey are less expected. While the former is clearly biblical in origin, the apiary metaphors are not. Thus, Marnix relies on the common sociocultural context of the beehive to instruct a popular Dutch audience in a fundamental difference between Calvinism and Catholicism. By identifying the Catholic host with polluted honey, Marnix defends the necessary presence of the Word for the Calvinist Lord's Supper, which he portrays as pure manna. Rather than feeding on the body of Christ, Marnix argues, the true Church feeds on the Word of God, which is present in the Calvinist wafer.

Inquiry into puritan “federal” doctrine established decades ago the now standard distinction between the covenant of grace and the national covenant. Perry Miller provided the first extensive analysis of the gracious covenant, and apparently it was he, too, who first found—or emphasized—in puritan sources the idea that “a nation as well as an individual can be in covenant with God.” His basic proposal, that ”the ‘covenant of grace’ … refer[red] to individuals and personal salvation in the life to come, [whereas the national covenant] applied to nations and governed their temporal success in this world,” has become a virtual article of faith in puritanist scholarship, although few recent historians have shared his profound interest in the latter covenant. Indeed, relegation of communal and this-worldly themes to a separate and inevitably secondary category has narrowed dramatically the focus of inquiry. It suffices to note that the three most recent monographs on the subject in English virtually equate “federal theology” with a gracious individualized contract exclusive to the elect (and its antithesis, the “covenant of works”).

Sarah Osborn does not appear in the definitive biographical dictionary, Notable American Women. She is not in the pages of Sydney Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People, nor of any more recent standard American religious history text. She failed to catch the attention of the editors and authors of the recent Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience or Dictionary of Christianity in America. The great New Divinity pastor-theologian Samuel Hopkins in some measure owed his career to Sarah Osborn, but studies of him mention her only in passing or not at all. Scholars have learned of her through the work of Mary Beth Norton and in the documentary history, Women and Religion in America, but the Sarah Osborn most often mentioned in connection with early New England is the one accused as a witch at Salem who died in Boston prison 10 May 1692.

Henry Gerhard Appenzeller (1858–1902)—along with Horace N. Allen, Horace G. Underwood, William B. Scranton, and Marion F. Scranton— pioneered Protestantism in Korea at the turn of the nineteenth century from about 1885 to 1902. Appenzeller intended to convert Koreans to Methodism, to establish Methodist societies, to reform Korean society in agreement with American Protestant evangelical teachings, and, finally, to help Korea become independent, democratic, and modernized, using the United States as a model. Appenzeller's commitment to “convert the heathen” and to reform Korean society along American Protestant Evangelical lines is easy to understand. But why the commitment to Korean independence, democratic reform, and modernization? Why did a pietistic, evangelical Protestant missionary place political concerns on a par with evangelical concerns in Korea? Appenzeller, and the rest of the small American community in Korea during the late nineteenth century, brought along the partially articulated, partially unconscious agenda to build the late nineteenth-century American evangelical Protestant vision of the City on a Hill. Appenzeller attempted to create a Christian Korea in a manner similar to late nineteenthcentury Protestant efforts to create a Christian America. Appenzeller's concept of a City on a Hill provides the key to understanding his commitment to independence, democracy, and modernization in Korea. Citizens had to hold the evangelical Protestant faith. They had to have Anglo-Saxon manners and customs. They had to live morally. The nation had to maintain independence from foreign powers, maintain a democratic form of government, and enjoy the benefits of modernization. We will consider the development of that vision in American history below.