The inevitable tension between freedom and order within the Roman Catholic Church has ever been an attractive and rich subject of comment. Perhaps nowhere can this issue be studied with more seriousness and clarity than in the fragile equilibrium between American bishops and priests. The balance within clerical ranks in the United States has long represented a singular combination of authority and obedience which has sought to reconcile itself in a society historically egalitarian and devoid of feudal relationships.

In the successive waves of “No Popery” which ebbed and flowed until the middle of the nineteenth century in British public life, the role played by the oldfashioned identification of the pope of the Roman Catholic Church with Antichrist is not easily discernible. Yet its presence is undeniable, though rarely on the surface or on the lips of those who, in the ordinary sense, “made history.” A study of the background and setting of John Henry Newman's thought on the papacy and the Antichrist has led me to uncover a neglected field of popular and cultured Antichrist thinking which helps to account for the persistence of “No Popery” sentiment in Christian history after its demise had been prematurely announced by more than one reasonable and enlightened politician.

Historians of Italian Christian Democracy have traditionally paid rather scant attention to the period 1903–1914, the years of the papacy of Pius X. Their lack of interest in this era cannot fully be explained by the scarcity of available official documents. The archives of the Vatican also keep under lock and key the documents pertaining to Leo XIII, the predecessor of Pius X. Yet volume after recently published volume has dealt with the Leonine period of Italian history. Interest in the papacy of Leo XIII is understandable in view of the fact that intellectual ferment in that era produced many of the sustaining ideas of Italian Christian Democracy. The Leonine period also saw in action for the first time some of the future leaders of Italian Christian Democracy.

Seven years ago the Irish people celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Monday Rebellion: the “Blood Sacrifice” that inspired the Anglo-Irish War leading to the Treaty, the Free State and finally the Republic. During the festivities, politicians paid homage to the memory of Padraig Pearse, James Connolly and their colleagues in the Volunteer and Citizen Armies; towns and villages erected monuments to men who died for Irish freedom; professional and amateur historians produced volumes of description and analyses of the brave deeds of Easter Week; bands played and singers sang patriotic airs; and someone blew up Nelson's Pillar in O'Connell Street.A prominent politician, a hero of 1916, allegedly described the last event in newspaper headline style as ‘noted British admiral leaves Dublin by air.’ The 1916 commemoration was more than a hymn to the past; it was also a tribute to the values and successes of physical force nationalism. Ireland in 1966 seemed a model of productive revolution: a stable community with viable democratic institutions and an expanding economy; an example for other countries emancipated from the scourge of imperialism. This was the consensus of a confident nation.

Lyman Beecher's approach to antislavery reform has received remarkably little attention from historians. No thorough study has been made of his attitudes toward chattel slavery, the methods he advanced to ameliorate or eradicate it, and his feelings toward free blacks and their future in America. The interpretations that have been proposed have been deficient in design, superficial in exposition and misleading in conclusion.

Founded in 1837 to provide a denohinational foreign mission board for the Old School Presbyterians, the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions (PBFM) had from the outset a very different outlook toward mission work among slave-holding Indians than did its closest rival, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), which served the New School Presbyterians and New England Congregationalists. The difference increased until 1859 when the latter organization, unable to reconcile its antislavery conviction with the determined proslavery position of the southern Indians, withdrew from that field. The PBFM, headquartered in New York City, thereupon took under its patronage most of those ABCFM missionaries who had been abandoned by their Boston-based board for refusing to expound and practice an antislavery position among the Choctaws, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Seminoles and Creeks.

Congregational minister and onetime home missionary Josiah Strong (1847–1916) is perhaps best known for his militant advocacy of American expansion. He was also, however, an early leader of the Social Gospel movement who urged the reform of society to cope with the problems of an industrial era. Throughout the thirty-year period during which Strong set forth his views in print (1885–1915) expansion and reform were important themes in his thought, although significant changes appeared in his treatment of both; this was symptomatic of a basic attitudinal shift toward American society.

A review in the New York Times observed that “the church abandoned the Negro in the 19th century and took up Hugh Hefner in the 20th. Churchmen in America have always been followers instead of leaders.” While this wry comment is not entirely true, it has enough truth to keep clergymen from undue selfesteem. It is clear, on the other hand, that churchmen on occasion have been leaders as well as followers. An equally wry comment attributed to Lincoln Steffens provides a clue to the clergy's leadership role. Americans, Steffens remarked, never learned to do wrong knowingly. Whenever they compromised with principle, they had to find a pious justification for it. Clerical leadership was especially prominent in the period prior to World War I, since this was a time when the American public looked to the pulpit for its pious justifications.