The free church form which much of British and American Protestantism has assumed stems primarily from the shaping of Nonconformity in seventeenth-century England. Yet the uniqueness and significance of this origin have not always been appreciated. These English and American churches have a basis distinct from that of the free churches which arose on the Continent in the nineteenth century. For unlike the latter, the free churches of Nonconformity developed within the fabric of Christian state and society and not out of any fundamental ideological conflict with secularized authority. Again, in England and America the free church form was molded in the unique environment of religious multiplicity which Puritan divisions produced. Consequently, it was as difficult for any religious group to respond to this environment in the classical sectarian pattern as for churchly institutions to maintain pretensions to uniformity—a fact which even church historians, impressed by Troeltsch's church-sect dichotomy, have been slow to recognize. And lastly, in both England and America the free church would seem to have been shaped by certain axioms of Puritan thought and piety. Indeed, this essay seeks to show that Puritanism both produced the problem and suggested the alternatives out of which the final free church concepts emerged.

The Popes of Rome ruled as both temporal and spiritual sovereigns for more than one thousand years, but historians have been little concerned with the former aspect of their sovereignty except as a factor in international politics and diplomacy and for its effect upon their status as heads of Catholic Christendom. Details of the internal administration of the States of the Church have been largely neglected. This state of affairs is particularly true with respect to the modern and recent periods of European history, during which the rise of great national states eclipsed the tiny temporal domain of the Pope. There is a substantial literature on the finances of the Papacy in the later Middle Ages, when finance is recognized as having played an important part in political affairs, but a survey of the literature for the modern period fails to reveal any systematic treatment of the subject. There is reason to believe, however, as this brief note indicates, that there is a significant connection between the financial situation of the States of the Church and the loss of the temporal power. It is even possible that this connection extends to matters of Church doctrine.

The decades of the 1870's and 1880's were times of increasing social consciousness on the part of the churches of the United States. The Civil War had been concluded, and the expansion of the nation within its own borders was resumed. All of the religious bodies— Protestant, Jewish, and Roman Catholic—were called upon to perform a task which neither the government nor any organized secular group was prepared to do: integrate literally millions of immigrants into the American way of life.

Harry Austryn Wolfson declared in an earlier volume that it was the purpose of Philo “not to teach true philosophy to students of Scripture, but to show the truth of Scripture to students of philosophy.” Wolfson, in his comprehensive series of which the present study is an integral part, likewise seeks to show, if not the truth, at least the comprehensiveness, of “scriptural philosophy” to contemporary students of philosophy.