History knows men who did not begin till they were in the middle of their days. It is only on approaching or entering the forties that some people seem to strike the line of their real achievement. Up to that period they may have been active and useful, but they have not awakened to their vocation; as yet they are unconscious of their true powers. While this does not apply to the spheres of art and music, it is far from being uncommon in politics and literature. There, as any student of biography soon becomes aware, a man may not find himself till he is about forty. Sometimes it is then or thereabouts—nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita—that something happens, and a man of action, a thinker, an author, first gets the chance or the idea of doing what turns out to be the most significant thing in his career.

There are few more enigmatic figures in the history of the Church of England than Archbishop Laud. During his lifetime he was assailed by his opponents with almost every crime that their bitterness could suggest, while his friends spoke of him in terms of somewhat measured praise. Dead, to those who disagreed with him he still seemed the “Pope of Canterbury,” only a little less than Antichrist himself, while his followers, hailing him as a martyr to his faith, soon forgot all his qualities but those that seemed to typify the Church of England, by him restored to its proper glories.

The defenders of John Calvin have sought to excuse his share in the execution of Servetus by resorting to the type of apologetic employed by Catholics in defense of the Inquisition. The victims, we are told, were politically and socially subversive and would have been suppressed in any age. In the case of Servetus this charge cannot be substantiated from his writings, since he did not reject the oath, nor the authority of the magistrate, neither did he counsel immorality. The only recourse for the apologists is to connect Servetus with Calvin's political opponents, the so-called Libertines. The argument has assumed slightly different forms in different hands, but three main contentions emerge: 1) that Servetus plotted with the Libertines for the overthrow of Calvin's régime; 2) that the Libertines endeavored to bring about the acquittal of Servetus; and 3) that they communicated with him to that end during the course of his trial.

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.

In Saint Augustine's time two theories concerning the origin of the church of Africa were current in Africa and Italy: either the Carthaginian church had been founded by missionaries from the church of Rome or the Gospel had been brought from various eastern lands. Carthage was undoubtedly the center from which Christianity spread throughout the whole of North Africa. As the number of converts increased and the churches multiplied, the same problems of organization arose and were solved as in other parts of the Empire, and ecclesiastical administration followed the lines of demarcation used by the civil power. Under Diocletian a reorganization of the imperial administrative scheme had taken place, and the Diocese of Africa, extending from Cyrenaica on the East to the Malva and Mount Atlas on the West, was comprised of the provinces of Tripolitana, Byzacenum, Proconsular Africa, Numidia, Mauretania Sitifiensis, and Mauretania Caesariensis. The district to the West, Mauretania Tingitana, was attached to the Diocese of Spain. By the end of the fourth century the church had created six provinces following the same lines, with the exception that Tingitana, although not a part of Africa politically formed a part of the ecclesiastical province of Mauretania Caesariensis. The last province to be created was Mauretania Sitifiensis, which was granted a primate by the Council of Hippo in 393.