In 498, four days after the death of Pope Anastasius II, two men were elected and consecrated bishop of Rome on the one day, the deacon Symmachus and the archpriest Laurentius. Fighting broke out between their supporters and the dispute was referred to Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king of Italy, who declared that Symmachus was to be pope. A synod held in 499 accepted him as pope and passed legislation on church government; it awarded to Laurentius the see of Nuceria. But trouble soon broke out again when Symmachus was accused of improper relations with women, squandering church property and celebrating Easter on the wrong date. While on his way to Ravenna, where Theodoric had summoned him to give an account of himself, he became convinced that he was being framed, and returned secretly to Rome by night without completing his journey. Theodoric reacted by appointing Bishop Peter of Altinum as visitor of the Roman see, but this became a further source of controversy. At some stage Laurentius returned to Rome. Rioting broke out again, with clergy being killed and Symmachus himself being attacked on one occasion. Two more synods failed to pacify in the city or put an end to the schism. This only came years later, in 507 or 508, when Theodoric ordered Festus, Laurentius' noble patron, to hand over the churches of Rome, which had been held by Laurentius, to Symmachus. Laurentius retired to Festus' estates, leaving Symmachus to preside over a reasonably peaceful and united church until his death in 514.

The first letter in Pope Innocent III's register of his second year was Vergentis in senium, a letter which he sent to the city of Viterbo in March, 1199. The decretal reflected Innocent's growing concern with heresy in the papal states and established new and more stringent penalties for those who rejected or subverted the Christian faith. In Vergentis, perhaps following the Roman lawyer Placentinus, Innocent imposed the traditional spiritual punishment of excommunication on heretics, equated heresy with lese majesty, and applied to convicted heretics the sanctions for treason in Roman law: complete confiscation of goods, even disinheriting innocent children. The punishment was fitting, Innocent observed, because a heretic injured celestial majesty, a crime far more heinous than any offense committed against temporal authority. Since the heretics in Viterbo continued to demand his attention later in his pontificate, we do not know how effective Innocent's decree was, but Vergentis did establish a precedent for papal action throughout Christendom. In order to root out all vestiges of heresy, Innocent extended the provisions of the decretal from the heretics themselves to their “supporters, defenders, and harborers.” The decretal marked the first firm step of his increasingly grim policy to use all of the resources of the church to extirpate heresy from Christian lands. The step from Viterbo to the Albigensian crusade was a short one. And, since heresy was an ecclesiastical crime, both laymen and clerics who were accused of heresy had their cases heard in ecclesiastical courts, giving lawyers another item to add to the list of cases in which the pope could exercise jurisdiction in the secular world.

In one of the great purple passages of nineteenth-century English historiography, Thomas Babington Macauley in his review of Leopold von Ranke's History of the Popes declared the papacy to be the western institution most worthy of historical study. Accordingly, historians have devoted innumerable pages to the analysis of papal politics, ideology, finances, and many other areas. However, there are still aspects of the history of the papacy that have been seriously neglected.

The Swiss Brethren originated “in, with and under” the Reformation. They lacked the traditional mystical thought patterns which were so influential for Thomas Müntzer, Hans Hut and Hans Denck and their followers in South and Central Germany. Although they possessed a vivid apocalyptic sense, which they shared with many of the Reformers, they did not permit their eschatological expectancy to crystallize into the concrete and violent prophecies of a Hans Hut or a Melchior Hoffman. Thus they avoided the chiliasm which at first stimulated, but eventually blighted, German and Dutch Anabaptism. They did not move from sectarian congregations to communalism like the Hutterites, with the result that in the later sixteenth century they were preyed upon and denounced by Hutterite missionaries anxious to lead their members to the promised land. They were willing to regard the Christological speculations of the Melchiorites as adiaphora, but Menno Simons remained too much a Melchiorite to accept the hand of brotherhood which they extended from Strassburg. Despite their impulses toward “Anabaptist ecumenicism,” followers of that other would-be Anabaptist ecumenicist, Pilgram Marpeck, denounced them in the Kunstbuch as a “harmful and corrupting sect” which sought Christ “outside the human heart … in the Scriptures or other dead creatures.” The relations of the Swiss Brethren to the German and Swiss Reformations, their relations to other Anabaptist groups and the phases of their development remain historical problems, in some cases controverted, in others insufficiently studied.

In the settlements of New York State in the early nineteenth century two movements of the American spirit converged toward the common end of the creation of a just social order for the happiness of man and the glory of God. The revival and the institution of legal order grew and flourished from a common root, the conviction that a renewed national community could be formed only on the basis of respect for law. The Biblical promise of millennial bliss fervently extended by the revivalists and the Constitutional promise of domestic tranquillity recited by the lawyers were both dependent for their fulfillment on the people's submission to regulations, whether religious or civil. The interest in law as the basis of “settling things” with both God and one's neighbors implied a confidence in the human ability to understand and to honor the principles by which the affairs of God and men are rightfully ordered.