The study of church-state relations in the age of Constantine may be approached in many ways. Imperial church building is one of these avenues of study and interpretation. Lactantius long ago complained of the building mania of Diocletian and other members of the Tetrarchy. Eusebius lauded the churches of Constantine as signal proofs of his magnificence and as the discharge of a sacred debt. Procopius later condemned the extravagance of Justinian's building programs, although without specifically mentioning churches. And many modern writers have taken the churches of Constantine as evidence for both a personal and a public commitment to Christianity. Only a few historians, however, have asked whether there was an overriding plan or purpose to this activity, e.g., Glanville Downey has suggested the likelihood of a plan in the case of Justinian. Thus arises the question, was the construction of churches the instrument or at least the reflection of an imperial policy toward Christianity?

There are only two moments during the Byzantine era at which the African Church emerges into something like daylight: on the morrow of the reconquest, in the middle years of the sixth century, and again almost a century later, under the emperors Heraclius and Constans II. Both in the controversies over the ‘three chapters’ under Justinian, and in those over monothelitism in the seventh century, the African Church took the lead in resisting what seemed, in the eyes of its leading churchmen, attempts by the Court to subvert the Chalcedonian orthodoxy.

The publication thirty years ago by M. M. Knappen of the diaries of Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward called attention to the puritan diary as a means of understanding puritan character. These were two examples of rather frequently kept journals in which pious diarists of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century made a careful account of both their moral successes and failures together with those events in their lives which were signs of God's judgment or favor. Such records provided for the authors a basis upon which meaningful decision could be made as they looked after the affairs of their mortal lives.

Few religious thinkers in modern times displayed a keener foresight and perception than John Henry Newman. The extraordinary talent he possessed in that regard rarely showed to better advantage than during Vatican Council II when repeated approbation was expressed in both the formal debates and in the private discussions of the bishops, the periti, and others in attendance at Rome for the theological views that Newman had held—often at the price of grave misunderstanding—a century or more ago. The two particulars which perhaps received more notice than any others were the ideas set forth in his famous essay in The Rambler for July, 1859, “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” a new edition of which was published as recently as 1961, and the Essay on the Dcvelopnient of Christian Doctrine, written while Newman was still an Anglican, and which was published in November, 1845, a few weeks after he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church.

Clergymen led the movement within American Protestantism known as Social Christianity or the Social Gospel. A small minority, primarily in the larger cities, began the shift away from individualistic views of salvation and ethics in the 1870's and 80's. By 1910 they had grown sufficiently in numbers and influence to secure official endorsement by the major denominations of a broad construction of Christian responsibility for the welfare of society.

The fate of Fundamentalism in historiography has been worse than its lot in history. The whirlwind of the twenties, after twisting through the denominations, ended by tearing even the name to shreds. Who were the Fundamentalists? Few today will use the name, and there seems to be no unity among those that do.