In textbooks on the history of early Christianity Marcellus of Ancyra usually merits one footnote, as the fourth-century oddity refuted by the Creed of Constantinople in the clause “and his kingdom will have no end,” since Marcellus taught that Christ's kingdom would end. But his significance is greater than that. Marcellus enjoyed notoriety in the 330s. Four decades later, in the 370s, opposition to Marcellus had all but ceased. But Basil of Caesarea, the first of the three Cappadocian fathers, campaigned relentlessly against Marcellus and his followers. Basil's virulent opposition to Marcellus still needs interpretation.

The year 1988 marks not only the centennial of the American Society of Church History, it is also the anniversary of two important works dealing with the theme of religious toleration and freedom of ideas. One is the fiftieth anniversary of G. G. Coulton's Inquisition and Liberty. The other is Henry Charles Lea's History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, published in three volumes early in 1888. Coulton's work became a model for many that followed: a highly readable, consciously engaging narrative outlining the main features of one of the darker chapters of medieval church history. It covered the development of religious nonconformity, the church's response, especially through the creation and operation of the Inquistion, and the principal victims of the Inquisition: the Albigensians, Waldensians, Spiritual Franciscans, and those accused of witchcraft. Lea's earlier treatment covered those themes in a far more extensive way, and he also included, unlike Coulton, a final chapter on the problem of religious orthodoxy in the schools as viewed from the standpoint of the Inquisition. Lea, in fact, is one of the few authors writing on heresy and inquisition who attempted to place the cases of questioned orthodoxy and freedom of thought in medieval schools and universities in this larger context. Although he did not pursue the topic in any depth, Lea was aware that the character of theological study and the proper training of an educated priesthood were linked to the issue of religious orthodoxy in the schools and the threat of heresy among those charged with the preservation and dissemination of truth.

Puritan religious experience centered around conversion, the soul's new birth in faith. Entry into the realm of the Spirit, the path to salvation, involved a protracted emotional confrontation with grace borne in God's Word. The injunction to begin life anew in grace is as old as John 3:3, which declares that one “cannot see the kingdom of God” without being “born again” but does not associate the event with any particular psychological experience; what one undergoes in becoming a child of the Spirit the gospel does not relate. Into this gap of possibility Puritan preachers insinuated their vision of holy passions; well known as physicians of the soul, they pieced together a compelling model of how the Spirit moves a human being as it translates individuals from the estate of damnation to that of grace.

Of the forces that have shaped contemporary American Catholic higher education, few have been more generative or influential than the proceedings of two court cases which tested the constitutionality of direct government aid to sectarian and church-related colleges and universities. These two court cases were Horace Mann League v. Board of Public Works (1966) and Tilton v. Richardson (1971). The impact of these judicial rulings over the radical transformation and substantive reform of American Catholic higher education during the past quarter of a century is the subject of this article.

Perry Miller, with characteristic lése majesté, told readers of his New England Mind that, if they wanted to see his footnotes, they would have to make a pilgrimage to the Harvard College Library (The Seventeenth Century [New York, 1939], p. ix). Times have changed, and at least some scholars have become more accommodating. Bruce Kuklick, for example, not only provided notes for his “New England Mind”—the superb recent study Churchmen and Philosophers from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven, 1985)—but now, through the good offices of Garland Publishing, has made available many of the sources to which those notes refer in American Religious Thought of the 18th and 19th Centuries: A Thirty-two Volume Set Reprinting the Works of Leading American Theologians from Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey and including Recent Dissertations (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988), $2,290. Kuklick and Garland deserve highest commendation for rescuing from unwarranted obscurity the authors and works reprinted here. The set's title may be inaccurate, and one may quibble about the exact lineup of books and articles included, but these volumes remain a magnificent achievement.