The treatise De area Noe morali by Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141) contains a short but significant piece of literal exegesis concerning Noah's Ark. This seemingly slight example of Victorine exegesis is of considerable intrinsic merit for in it Hugh ventured to criticize an accepted exegetical “authority” and offered in its place his own interpretation of the passage. It is the purpose of this article to examine Hugh's criticism of the traditional exegesis and his positive contributions through the correlation of reason, auctoritas, and a fresh examination of the literal sense of Genesis VI.

From Alphonse Aulard to Peter Gay historians have been fascinated with the attitudes of the philosophes toward religion.1 In the present essay attention falls on a neglected aspect of the question, the impact of the philosophes' ideas on the dechristianization movement in the French Revolution. Dechristianization means the attempt to suppress Christianity either by legislation or by force. In the Revolution, dechristianization took the following forms: aggressive anti-clericalism, prohibition of any Christian practice or worship either in public or private life, closing of the churches, the formation of a revolutionary calendar to replace the Christian one, and the establishment of new religious cults—the Cult of Reason and the Cult of Supreme Being. It is argued here that a direct influence can be traced from the philosophes to the dechristianizers of the Revolution. The dechristianizer did not belong to any clearly defined sociological group. He was an aristocrat like Anacharsis Cloots, or bourgeois such as Jacques René Hébert and Pierre Chaumette.2 Their ideas were nurtured from the deistic and atheistic writings of the philosophes.

William Pitt's decision to seek the abolition of the independent Irish parliament and the union of the established churches in Ireland and England ended a quarter century experiment in Irish legislative independence. During this brief period the penal system had been substantially modified, and the traditional Protestant ascendancy partially dismantled by liberal Protestants themselves. The Church of Ireland, however, had not shared in the enthusiasm of this Irish “renaissance”; parliamentary spokesmen had demanded abolition of the tithe, enforcement of clerical residence, endowment of the Roman Catholic clergy and elimination of abuses in ecclesiastical patronage. Anticlericalism had increased, tithe resistance had infected even Protestant tenants, and pamphlets condemning the Church of Ireland as the unholy wonder of Christendom were penned by Protestants themselves. The alarm of Irish churchmen only too aware of the fundamental weaknesses of the established church, the clamor of British peers with large Irish landholdings and the outbreak of rebellion in 1797, finally convinced British statesmen that the crisis could be relieved only by the abolition of the Irish legislature.

In his essay, “From the Covenant to the Revival”, Perry Miller suggested that after the Revolution America's traditional concept of the Covenant between Jehovah and His people gradually changed. No longer did a calamity bring abject self-debasement and pleas for mercy in the face of well-deserved punishment. No more would Americans look upon a crisis in their national affairs as an occasion for jeremiads, for confessing their sins and begging relief from the retribution they merited. Miller wrote,

A theology which for almost two centuries had assumed that men would persistently sin, and so would have to be recurrently summoned to communal repentance, had for the first time identified its basic conception with a specific political action. Then, for the first time in the lite of the conception, the cause was totally gained. Did not a startling inference follow: these people must have reformed themselves completely, must now dwell on a pinnacle of virtuousness?

Advancement in contemporary world missions has not come without heart-break, failure, defeat—prior to victory. One dramatic illustration of manifold blunders—and then success—is Thomas Coke's heroic attempt to establish missions in Africa.

Africa was coming more and more to the attention of thinking Englishmen. Abolition of the nefarious slave trade was being seriously discussed in humanitarian circles. The dark and mysterious continent caught Dr. Coke's imagination. In March, 1787, while in Charleston, South Carolina, he noted: “… Since my visit to the islands [West Indies], I have found a peculiar gift for speaking to the Blacks. It seems to be almost irresistible. Who knows but the Lord is preparing me for a visit in some future time to the coast of Africa?”