The historical consciousness of modern Western man, a trait of the cultured mind of the last half-dozen generations, seems to be the legacy to a secular civilization from the historians of the Christian church.

Since the creation of man, to be sure, rudimentary types of historical thought have doubtless existed nearly everywhere. With memory and moral freedom of choice was given to Adam the ethical situation in which historical thought appears, for history is the interpretation of social memory in relation to present decisions and hopes for the future. This absolute beginning of historical thought is forever shrouded in mystery, however, and the earliest records of such thought, ages and centuries later, bear little similarity to our patterns of history. These earliest histories are precisely what the modern historian pursues with puritan hatred, myth and legend. The first histories recount relatively little of what men have done; they tell of natural disasters, wars, and migrations primarily as the deeds of the gods. Modern secular history has sought to escape this religious aspect of its archetype, but if the thesis of this paper is correct, the attempt has been vain, the gods have been exorcised from history only by the power of other gods, and the ancient myths displaced only for a more extravagant mythology. And the vagaries of secular Western history are the recognizable corruptions of Christian church history.

The question posed in the title of this article is answered, without further research, by the obvious facts of history. The English refugees from the wrath of Queen Mary did not plan to live long enough in their temporary homes on the Continent to be regarded as inhabitants. A fruitful field for investigation, however, lies in the study of the results of this transitory sojourn in the Swiss Cantons and the valley of the Rhine.

The “age of reason”—so often an unfounded characterization of the eighteenth century—had no more aggressive exponent than David Williams ( 1738–1816). Born in Glamorganshire, he fulfilled a promise exacted by his dying father to enter the dissenting ministry and was ordained to a Somerset congregation in 1758. His theological views proving unsatisfactory to this group he removed to an Exeter congregation in 1761. For its use he prepared a “Liturgy on the Principles of the Christian Religion,” but the older members objected to his ideas and he to their morals, and in 1769 he took a congregation in Middlesex where he remained four years. Thereafter he turned to writing of which he did a great deal in the next two decades, mainly controversial in nature.