[The question raised by Jacques Barzun in the following article is one which deserves serious consideration by the American Society of Church History and by all who are concerned with the training of church historians. Far too often we assume that simply to do a little research, or a lot, is enough to create an adequate understanding of the church's past. Dr. Barzun, provost of Columbia University, provokes thought and may even help us use our resources more wisely. The Editors.]

As we move in this study from Constantius to Henry VIII to John Fitzgerald Kennedy we move in Christian doctrine from heresy to orthodoxy to “American” Catholicism, and in Church-State relations from domination to manipulation to separation or from a form of Caesaro-Papism to Lay State regalism to Lay State separatism of the American type. An important key to understanding these shifts or changes is to be found in a study of the Magistrate's theological conception of the magistrate's office.

We are better informed about the outlawed Anabaptist sect than any other religious movement of the sixteenth century. While there is a wealth of material on Luther, we badly lack records of the common people who accepted his doctrines. Paradoxically enough, the richness of Anabaptist sources is due to the very fact that Lutheran, Zwinglian, and Catholic authorities did their utmost to suppress the movement.

The Catholic relief act passed by the Irish parliament in 1778 was the first significant breach of that comprehensive system of legal discrimination against Irish Catholics known in the eighteenth century as the Popery laws. The act of 1778 removed virtually all of the legal restrictions respecting the acquisition and free testamentary disposition of landed property imposed on Irish Catholics by the legislators of William III and Anne and formed a powerful precedent for the subsequent acts of 1782 and 1791–93 that repealed discriminatory statutes affecting the Irish Catholic hierarchy, secular clergy, and the Catholic business and professional classes. While most scholars have fully recognized the revolutionary character of this act and have discussed its provisions many times, a mistaken impression that no detailed record of this measure's passage through the Irish house of commons existed has discouraged original research into the complicated set of circumstances surrounding its enactment. Consequently, the relation of the Anglo-American crisis to the cause of Catholic relief, the connection between this particular act and the movement for Irish legislative independence during the later phases of the war for American independence, and the extraordinary arguments and tactics employed by supporters and opponents of the bill in an exclusively Protestant parliament have remained unnoticed.