There are both striking similarities and significant differences between the Lollards of the fifteenth century and the radical Puritans of the sixteenth. Both rejected the authority of the established church in England, and both suffered for such boldness. With the passage of De heretico comburendo in 1401 the so-called Wycliffites were liable to inquisitorial proceedings and punishments. Lollards were now felons as well as heretics. In 1406, by means of a supplement to the 1401 legislation, the laymen in Parliament at last took heed of the warning from the churchmen that confiscation of church possessions threatened all lordship, secular as well as spiritual. Under a constitution drafted at the Oxford Assembly from November to December, 1407 and republished at St. Paul's in 1409, any preacher other than a priest in his own parish was required to obtain a license from the ordinary or the archbishop in order to preach. Arundel further decreed that such preachers were to speak only on the subjects set forth in Peckham's constitution, Ignorantia sacerdotum. As the chief legal instrument of this English Inquisition, De heretico comburendo remained in effect until set aside by Henry VIII. It was later revived by Mary, and finally repealed by Elizabeth.

The month of December 1816 found Schleiermacher thinking about too many things at once and not at all in the best of health. To his friend Gass, who seemed to have no trouble combining scholarship with administration, he sent a plea for help:

I have long been bent upon making just some superficial patristic and scholastic studies, in order to gather a few handy quotations for my dogmatics; and I never got around to it. I would be very much obliged if you would write me somewhat more exactly how you have gone about it and on what [passages] you have chiefly relied.

Over the past several decades American historians have emphasized the importance of New England ministers as town leaders during the colonial and Revolutionary eras. Recently, several scholars have examined changing roles of Congregational and Presbyterian pastors from the 1630s to the early nineteenth century. Ministerial dismissals are an important aspect of this subject, yet historians have not given this topic the critical analysis it deserves. This essay will discuss the nature of these dismissals and explain their significance in relation to several broad questions of social change in New England prior to 1790. Although New Hampshire's experience with clerical removals was not necessarily representative of New England, that state merits special attention because it has been neglected in studies of this period.

In the 1850s, when both Oregon and Washington were pioneer lands just emerging from wilderness conditions, sporadic Indian warfare made life dangerous and miserable for white settlers and threatened the very existence of the Indian subtribes which inhabited the mountains and valleys south and north of the great Columbia River basin. In the previous decade a provisional territorial government had been organized, even before the treaty of 1846 set the international boundary at the forty-ninth degree of latitude. Federal territorial government dates from 1849. In 1853 Washington territory was set off from Oregon.

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.