Jacob Burckhardt somewhat naively recorded that when he first came to the University of Berlin to study history, his eyes opened wide with astonishment at the first lectures he heard by Leopold von Ranke, Gustav Droysen and Philipp August Böckh. He realized that the same thing had befallen him as befell the knight Don Quixote, for he had loved his science on hearsay and suddenly here it was appearing before him in gigantic proportions and he had to lower his eyes. The occasion of delivering a presidential address to an august society of scholars, following on the podium historians of great distinction, and speaking on a topic of such magnitude is an equally humbling experience.

Manuscript research is an endeavor filled with suspense; often made more difficult by physical labor and severe weather, the scholar's research may prove fruitless, or it may yield an unknown text which reveals again the gaps in scholars' knowledge of ancient Christian tests.

Acceptance of providence, the belief that an ultimate being determines the course of events, has always created problems for moralists and advocates of free will, and for obivous reasons. If any events has been foreordained, how can hemans be free? If all is determined, why should humans try to do what is right? Aside from the philosophical questions raised by a belief in provedence, however, scholars such as the distinguished economists Jacob Viner have begun to examine the doctrine of providence from the point of view of its broad ideological and social impact. Though Professor Viner modestly claimed that his study of providence was simply an intellectual history pursued for its own sake, he demonstrated many of the doctrine's implications for early modern thought and social structures. Similar emphasis on the significance of the early modern idea of providence is also found in Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic.

The Americanist crisis in the last decade of the nineteenth century climaxed the attempt of a group of liberal prelates and their associates to adapt Roman Catholicism to democratic institutions and values. Almost twenty years ago Robert Cross put this complex movement within the context of a growing American Catholic liberalism in the postbellum period. The full dimensions of that liberalism are still coming into focus as archival materials and unpublished sources become more available to the historian. The recent discovery of a remarkable association of New York priests shows another facet of the Americanist controversy that better enables us to appreciate the peculiar lines that the episcopal struggle assumed.

Whatever else may be said about the Reverend William Dwight Porter Bliss, his reform energy was indefatigable. From the Haymarket Affair until the Red Scare, he was instrumental in organizing, researching, editing, publishing and lecturing on behalf of the coming of God's Kingdom. Along with Walter Rauschenbusch and George Herron, Bliss was certainly one of the most prominent spokesmen for the left wing of the Social Gospel.