In 1636 the Puritan Commonwealth of Massachusetts Bay was confronted with a sectarian outburst which rent the religious and civil peace of Boston and temporarily threatened that of the whole colony. Certain of the Boston congregation, led by Anne Hutchinson and abetted by John Cotton, the teacher of the church, charged that the clergy of the Bay, almost entirely, were not true ministers of the gospel but in fact a company of unregenerate “legalists”, preaching a “covenant of works” instead of a “covenant of grace”, and there by hindering the work of redemption. For nearly two years the “Antinomian Controversy” darkened the radiance of the City on the Hill, and echoes of the affair returned in the next decade to plague apologists for the New England Way. Part of the apologists' difficulty was the fact that their star, the illustrious Cotton, had been on the wrong side.

Although nothing approaching the number of words written by Benjamin Hoadly during the eighty-five years of life has been written about him in the 185 years since his death—still, the contentious Bishop has been by no means neglected by historians of eighteenth century England. Hoadly's peculiar position with respect to the Established Church has been dissected out of the complicated anatomy of the Bangorian controversy. His major political treatises have been screened to reveal original contributions to political theory—with largely negative results. His remarkable and rapid climb up the ladder of preferment after the accession of George I, when the Whigs once more prevailed in ministerial and parlimentary positions, has been generally interpreted as payment for substantial services rendered. However, so far as the writer is aware, the preliminary establishment of Benjamin Hoadly's right to Whig patronage has not received detailed consideration.

Christians of every stripe are bound into faith communities by two sets of identifying metaphors. One, the body of Christ, is derived from the New Testament's account of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The other, drawn from Hebraic prophecy, is linked to the understanding that Jesus was of the house and lineage of David. As the crucified Messiah, he stood at the head of the house of Israel as both Lord and Christ. In the practical terms spelled out in the Pauline letters, the first of these metaphorical congeries describes the church as Christ's body, an entity with members and a head. The second turns Christ's followers into a kinship group that is a party to a new covenant with God. Despite its heterogeneity, its inclusion of Gentiles as well as Jews, this group—along with the Jews—is one that the ancient of days selected to be his chosen people.

We, Lucifer, lord of darkness, ruler of deep sadness, emperor of the hellish cesspool, duke of the sulphuric waters, king of the cliff, and administrator of the hellish fire, to each and everyone in our realm, friends, bishops, prelates, cathedral canons, clergy, and all others of whatever dignity and the state you may be in: our greetings.

On December 15, 1851, Andrew Jackson Davis—self-styled Harmonial philosopher and noted scion of the spiritualist world—sent a public letter. Addressed through the Hartford Times to the controversial Congregationalist minister Horace Bushnell, the message concerned the first of a series of lectures Bushnell was delivering at his North Church. Davis, who at the time claimed Hartford, Connecticut, as his base, was clearly excited. The announced topic—“On the Naturalistic Theories of Religion as Opposed to Supernatural Revelation”—already gave Davis “much pleasure,” suggesting a position “entirely unlike any other ever assumed by the clergy of Christendom.” More than that, Bushnell's way of approaching the subject and defining his position was “considerably unlike the method pursued by most clergymen,” since Bushnell relied on his own “reason or judgment” to address “the corresponding faculty in the mind of the hearer.” Davis went on to propose that, with so important an issue, better to move the lectures from Bushnell's North Church pulpit to a different location and to invite “all parties interested” to “analyze and examine before the same audience the various positions.”

Some forty years ago, Frederic J. Turner, the eminent American historian, called attention to the fact that the religious life of the frontier has not been sufficiently investigated. Since then, much important work in this field has been done. One aspect of the religious life of the frontier, however, has been almost entirely neglected, that of Swedenborgianism, or, as followers of the Swedish prophet prefer to say, that of the New Church. Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Stockholm in 1688. Since we are approaching the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of his birth, now is an opportune time to investigate a hitherto neglected influence, very potent on the American frontier during the nineteenth century.

Oscar Handlin noted some years ago that most immigrants to the United States found the voluntary practices of American religious institutions “unfamilar and disturbing.” This was not the case with the Irish Catholic immigrants in this country. They had little difficulty adjusting to these practices in America since they had developed them in Ireland before coming to the United States. Thus, many American Irish Catholics viewed voluntaryism not as a uniquely Protestant or American experience; they saw it as part of their Irish Catholic tradition.

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.

Of all the evils of the late medieval church, none was complained about quite so frequently by contemporary theologians as that which Pierre D'Ailly termed the “evil of superfluity.” Jan Hus compared the prelates of his own day to the scribes and pharisees of old, who imposed many fasts, many prayers and other hard things upon the people while they themselves did none of them. A man of Adam's ststure had but one command fulfill and failed, Jean Gerson wrote at the start of the fifteenth century; how then is the Christian to escape, placed as he is among innumerable commands? If Augustine could complain about the Judaic condition of the church of his time, what, Gerson containud, would he have to say now! According to wessel Gansfort, the “forest if decrees and decretals” had become so dense that the Christian could scarcely find his way any longer to a study and knowledge of sacred Scripture.Even Gabriel Biel was forced to admit that the burden of Christian obedience had become heavier than the old Judaic yoke, if one took into accont the plethora of ecclesiastical laws and ceremonics.

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions appointed its first men to the Turkish empire in 1818. Five years afterward (1823) the Board's Syrian Mission was established at Beirut, where shortly two Armenian ecclesiastics were received into the Mission church as the first-fruits of American missionary labors in Turkey. In 1831 William Goodell, of the Syrian Mission established himself at Constantinople, where he was joined the following year by a new recruit, Henry Dwight. These men were under instructions to devote themselves to Armenian work in the Turkish capital. Thus was begun the Board's Armenian Mission.

Since the dawn of the Christian era the relationship between church and state has been one of the pivotal issues of western civilization. Men have offered a variety of answers to this problem. The much- persecuted Anabaptists of the 16th century presented one set of answers, radical for their age, which called for a decisive separation of the church from the state and complete freedom for the church to pursue its vocation in the world. The Anabaptists were a distressing annoyance to the civil authorities. This movement posed for the 16th century the acute problem: how should religious dissent be handled?

During the sixth session of the Council of Trent, Girolamo Seripando and others proposed a theory of justification which the council fathers felt leaned toward the Lutheran view of justification. The theory, known as duplex justitia or double justice, was reviewed by the various theologians, reflected upon, and finally rejected.

Many people in the United States today feel that England is fighting a battle that is also their own. The English people, on the other hand, note with great satisfaction and gratitude the sympathy that the United States displays for their life and death struggle. A similar mutual interest existed between the American colonies of the seventeenth century and the England of the age of the Revolution. We have only to look at the many impassioned controversies on both sides of the Atlantic. They tell us a lively story of the exchange of ideas between Old and New England. Robert Baillie, Samuel Rutherford, William Twiss, three outstanding members of the Westminster Assembly, engaged in long arguments with John Cotton on various problems of doctrine and church government. John Cotton and other New England ministers in long pamphlets answered any reproaches of heresy made by the English or Scotch Presbyterians. It is safe to say, furthermore, that the controversy between John Cotton and Roger Williams, with which we are here concerned, would never have been started without Williams's participation in the debates of the Long Parliament in 1643/44.

It has typically been said of the English Reformation that the doctrine of unconditional predestination (that is, predestination without foreknowledge of merit or repentance but soley as an act of God's will to redeem some of mankind as a manifestation of grace) was neither emphasized nor of central importance until the “Genevan” influence of the returning Marian exiles and the wide dissemination of Calvin's writings in England after the accession of Elizabeth. It is the purpose of this article to show that, (1) a soteriologically rooted doctrine of unconditional predestination of the type characteristic of the so-called “Rhineland Reformers” was central to key figures of the early English Reformation, was accepted and expressed by many other leaders and theological writers of the English Reformation prior to the accession of Mary and was upheld by important and influential continental divines resident in England; (2) the doctrine of predestination in the English Reformation had been developed to the point of reprobation and double predestination and frequently expressed as such before 1553; (3) while this predestinarian emphasis in English Protestant theology was to a large extent the result of the influence of the continental Reformation, it had been received prior to the return of the Genevan exiles and the pervasive influence of Calvin in Elizabethan England. Thus the Genevan influence reinforced and further refined English predestinarian theology. It might be added that Calvin's influence ought not to be considered an unusually harsh one with respect to predestination; not only does Calvin follow the general pattern of earlier Reformed theology, but also does Reformed theology in the later part of the sixteenth century tend toward a more rigid and scholastic version of the doctrine quite apart from Calvin, whose real influence could well operate in the opposite direction, as the recent study by Brian Armstrong shows.

In 1868 Ulysses S. Grant remarked that there were three great parties in the United States: the Republican, the Democratic, and the Methodist Church. This was an understandable tribute, given the active role of leading Methodists in his presidential campaign, but it was also a realistic judgment, when set in the context of the denomination's growing political authority over the previous half century. As early as 1819, when, with a quarter of a million members, “the Methodists were becoming quite numerous in the country,” the young exhorter Alfred Branson noted that “politicians… from policy favoured us, though they might be skeptical as to religion,” and gathered at county seats to listen to the preachers of a denomination whose “votes counted as fast at an election as any others.” Ten years later, the newly elected Andrew Jackson stopped at Washington, Pennsylvania, en route from Tennessee to his presidential inauguration. When both Presbyterians and Methodists invited him to attend their services, Old Hickory sought to avoid the political embarrassment of seeming to favor his own church over the fastest-growing religious movement in the country by attending both—the Presbyterians in the morning and the Methodists at night. In Indiana in the early 1840s the church's growing power led the Democrats to nominate for governor a known Methodist, while tarring their Whig opponents with the brush of sectarian bigotry. Nationally, as the combined membership of the Methodist Episcopal Church [MEC] and Methodist Episcopal Church, South [MECS] grew to over one and a half million by the mid-1850s, denominational leaders could be found complaining that the church was so strong that each political party was “eager to make her its tool.” Thus Elijah H. Pilcher, the influential Michigan preacher, found himself in 1856 nominated simultaneously by state Democratic, Republican, and Abolition conventions.

The enthusiastic reception with which the Catholic hierarchy greeted the burgeoning Christian Democratic movements immediately after World War II could leave the impression of a solidarity born of a long and stable relationship. In fact, such was not the case. Christian Democracy had failed for a century in its attempts to reconcile Catholicism with the democratic values emanating from the French Revolution. Antirepublican forces within the church had been too strong and the hierarchy too unsympathetic to permit such a reconciliation. In addition, the democratic forces outside the church had come to incorporate anticlericalism as part of their creed. Both camps seemed to share at least one view in common: one could not be both a Christian and a democrat. Only small groups of Christian republicans sought to challenge this assumption by word and deed.

In late 1433, after two years of intrigue and negotiations, Pope Eugenius IV agreed to acknowledge the legitimate existence of the Council of Basel. The recently crowned Emperor Sigismund had gone to Basel, and numberous clerics, including many cardinals, had abandoned the curia for the council. An obstreperous duke of Milan threatened the papal states “in the name of the holy synod,” and in May 1434 the populace of Rome rebelled, foreing the pope to flee down the Tiber.

Witnessing as it did the seven hundredth anniversary of the death of St. Thomas Aquinas, the year 1974 was marked by multiple conferences and publications dedicated to his life, his thought and his place in medieval intellectual history. The recently completed septicentennial also provides a useful vantage point from which to examine the current historiographical assessment of St. Thomas' influence in modern intellectual history. Aquinas scholars devoted little systematic attention to this topic in 1974, a fact which, in itself, reflects a striking and persistent imbalance within the field of Aquinas studies. It is a commonplace to state that St. Thomas enjoyed an authority in the period since the thirteenth century far exceeding any he achieved in his own day. Yet, a consideration of the historiography of Thomas' place in modern thought reveals the fact that the Angelic Doctor's substantial post-medieval reputation has not generally been matched by an equally plentiful measure of historical understanding. For two generations, historians of the Middle Ages have made great strides toward the systematic recovery of the historical Thomas Aquinas. But the task of uncovering the historical significance of his thought within the changing contexts of post-medieval culture still awaits its Grabmanns and Chenus.

Writing in the midst of World War II, the Italian exiles Gaetano Salvemini and Giorgio La Piana charged that the Catholic church in America had bestowed its blessing upon Benito Mussolini and fascism.1 In discussing this charge the historian John Diggins admitted that “at first glance it does appear that the American clergy had indeed composed a political choir in behalf of Fascism.”2 Diggins portrayed a large number of Catholic clergy led by figures like Cardinal William O'Connell of Boston and Father Charles E. Coughlin who found occasion to praise Mussolini. He outlined the views of the major Catholic periodicals and discovered that only the Paulist-sponsored Catholic World took exception to fascism with any consistency.3 Nonetheless, Diggins partially dismissed the charge of Salvemini and La Piana. He argued that the Catholic church in the United States during the interwar years was not a pro-Fascist monolith and briefly touched on the anti-Fascist endeavors of such individuals as Monsignor Joseph Giarrochi, Father Francis Duffy, and Father James Gillis, C.S.P., the erstwhile editor of the Catholic World. Notably, Diggins accorded particular status among Catholic anti-Fascists to Monsignor John A. Ryan, whom he described as having waged “a relentless assault upon Mussolini's dictatorship and upon the Catholic defense of Fascism” and as being “the theological thorn in the flesh of complacent Catholic apologists for Fascism.”4