One of the more interesting features of American religious life in the years following the Civil War was the renascence of perfectionist or “holiness” teachings among evangelical Protestants. Declaring that the scriptural Baptism of the Holy Spirit brought entire sanctification, perfectionists held that all Christians should seek and expect a “second blessing”, beyond the conversion experience, which would bring complete and instantaneous purification from sin and perfect holiness toward God. Beyond the “new birth” of justification, there lay the “higher life” of sanctification. These doctrines were first promulgated in the United States by the evangelist Charles Finney in the 1830s. Finney drew upon the theology of John Wesley and the early Methodists whose doctrine of “perfect love” paralleled his own religious experience. In the antebellum decades a proliferation of perfectionist devotional literature and a wave of perfectionist-oriented revivals bore witness to the appeal of the doctrine. Although Methodists were in the vanguard, the movement was thoroughly interdenominational. In this period perfectionism also had strong social connotations, and many social reforms of the era drew freely upon perfectionist impulses.

In an influential book of thirty years ago, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915, Charles Howard Hopkins interpreted the founding in 1908 of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the forerunner of the present National Council, as a stage in the flowering of the social gospel in American Christianity. His interpretation was soon confirmed by John Alexander Hutchison. In We Are Not Divided, a study of the pronouncements of the Federal Council, Hutchison wrote that the Federal Council was born of the marriage between “the idea of social service and the idea of interdenominational cooperation”. By “the idea of interdenominational cooperation”, however, Hutchison meant little more than what Hopkins had already defined as the impulse for social Christianity, and there the matter has rested for subsequent historians, including two former secretaries of the Federal Council.

Athough Quakers had always cautioned their brethren about the perils of wealth, in late eighteenth-century America a generation of Quakers arose that criticized wealth far more severely than any of its forebears had. These critics included John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, two of the most renowned Quakers since George Fox, as well as a score of Friends who were the liveliest members of the church in the eighteenth century. That these men should focus their critical attention on the spiritually corrosive effect of wealth, when their predecessors had not, may be explained in part by the passing of a century in which Friends used the time to accumulate fortunes, in part by some deeply quietistic Friends' discovery of an inherent conflict between materialism and spiritual religion and in part by the political situation of late eighteenth-century American Friends, which illuminated the tension between Friends' devotion to their property and their devotion to their religious ethics.

A major problem in assessing the ecclesiastical policies of the government of Louis XIII is the equivocal reputation of its chief ministers as a churchman. Cardinal Richelieu enjoys an uncertain reputation as churchman in large measure because of the inherent ambiguities of his position as both prince of the church and chief minister of the king of France. Further compounding this ambiguous position was Gallicanism, the peculiar stance of the French church on matters of church-state and Franco-papal relations. A classic example of how Gallicanism could introduce complex and independently derived factors into Richelieu's policies was the decennial meeting of the Assembly of the Clergy of 1625. At that meeting, early in Richelieu's tenure as chief minister, the French clergy demonstrated with great vigor that Gallicanism was not a doctrine of the past and that it had wellsprings quite independent of the crown and Richelieu. Even in 1625 most people, including the papal curia, found it difficult to believe that the behavior of the Assembly of the Clergy was not dictated by Richelieu. We shall see, however, that the Assembly adopted measures well calculated to irritate the Holy See at a time when Cardinal Richelieu had every desire to placate Urban VIII. In 1625 Richelieu was negotiating feverishly to extricate Louis XIII from war in the Valtellina without losing the fruits of his aggressive action there. Richelieu's plan called for a papal garrison to be placed in the valley to keep it neutral and closed to Spain. Necessarily, the pope's cooperation was vital, which meant that it was not the moment to offend Urban VIII by attacking papal authority at home.

The article that follows is a discussion of a document of some importance in American Catholic history, one that has not yet received consideration by historians. The Petition and Report of the National Catholic Welfare Council to Pius XI of April 25, 1922, is a protest by American bishops against a decree of suppression issued by the Consistorial Congregation of the Vatican, the effect of which would have been to destroy the newly organized Welfare Council.

Despite their ultimate breakdown, the Malines Conversations (1921–1926) between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church were an event of momentous significance for the communions engaged in them. They heralded changing times, for Rome a cautious step from ultra-monantism and anti-Modernism towards the “aggiornamento” of John XXIII, and for the Church of England a partial triumph of the new-found desire for church union over older attitudes of “no-popery.” But their real importance can be set in wider perspective: the guarded measure of mutual recognition they introduced marked, in one respect at least, the end to four centuries of schism.

For those wishing to generalize about the Victorians the Great Exhibition of 1851 usually proves irresistable. But it does seem an obvious omission that so little is said about the disorders which kept the country upended during the preceding six months, that is, during the episode of the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the “Papal Aggression”. Christopher Dawson has urged that the one needs the other to symbolize properly the Victorian frame of mind. Here I wish to outline the underlying causes of this last great outburst of No-Popery feeling in an effort to trace the paradox of the aroused, angry, bigoted Guy Fawkes Day-men of November appearing the next summer as the staid, curious and progressive-minded citizens sunning themselves in the glory of all that glittering machinery so carefully displayed beneath the vaulted glass dome of their Crystal Palace.

When Herbert O. Brayer reviewed No Man Knows My History, Fawn Brodie's biography of the Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, in the Mississippi Valley Historical Review in 1946, his words were prophetic. “This book”, he said, “which purports to be a ‘definitive biography’ will probably be one of the most highly praised and highly condemned historical works of 1945.” The book has indeed been highly praised and highly condemned, with plaudits coming generously from professionals in the field of American history. It quickly became the standard life of Joseph Smith and the most influential book on early Mormonism, a status it has retained. Evidence of the respect it still commands is provided by Sidney Ahlstrom of Yale University who recently termed it a “sympathetic and insightful account” which is “unequaled” as a life of the Mormon prophet.

In A Handbook of Christian Theology Jerald C. Brauer notes that “the kingdom of God is one of the most fruitful yet controversial concepts in Christian theology. It has been employed to uphold the status quo, and it has been a revolutionary ideal used to break social forms and customs.”1 This bibliographical survey will list articles and books that deal with the kingdom of God and closely related subjects in the history of Christianity, concentrating on the West.2