American Protestants in the early nineteenth century faced intellectual and social challenge which made conspicuous the weakness of their own divided condition. The American Revolution—which was part of a larger upheaval in the Atlantic Community—had spread Enlightenment ideas, with their aggressive attack on orthodoxy. Quite typical was the lament of a convention of Massachusetts Congregational ministers in 1799 over “the present decay of Christian morals and piety, and the awful prevalence of speculative and practical infidelity.” Well before the middle eighteen-thirties the tide of deism had ebbed, but some, like the editors of the new Christian Review, were still building sea walls against it.

History and church history are disciplines well entrenched in the schools. This means that church historians commonly have an unquestioned place in theological school faculties. Hence there is little incentive for them to become self-conscious or troubled about the reason-for-being either of the discipline or of themselves. Probably church history is always included in the curriculum more from habit than because there is an articulated rationale for it. I dare say that many church historians if asked the question “Why have church history in the curriculums” would reply in effect that its place is obvious, and if one cannot see the obvious it is hopeless to try to explain it to him.

Professor Kenneth Scott Latourette has long maintained that church historians must take into account the role that missions have played in ecclesiastical history. His point is especially well taken in considering the Presbyterian Schism of 1837.

When Christian missionaries returned to the Congo in the nineteenth century, all traces of the promising Portuguese missionary effort of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries had been obliterated. The Kingdom of the Congo which had produced several generations of Christian Kings, thousands of converts, even an African clergy and an African Bishop, had been literally swept away by the European slave trade. The Church had paid a heavy price for its failure to restrain the greed of the faithful, and one would scarcely expect to find the error repeated. Furthermore, the intervening centuries had produced in Europe a growth of humanitarian sentiment which had sensitized the Christian conscience to the suffering of the oppressed; indeed this concern for the temporal welfare of the African had been an important factor in the outburst of nineteenth century missionary activity. Yet when this second encounter of European and African produced in the Congo Free State a form of exploitation which rivalled the first in its brutality, dedicated Catholic missionaries and zealous Catholic prelates staunchly defended the regime against the attacks of reformers. The explanation of this melancholy episode appears to lie in the fact that sectarian interest, national loyalty, and an overwhelming faith in the benefits of Europeanization were allowed to obscure the essential facts.

The student of Wyclif's work soon learns that communion with the master is only one of his rewards, and that it is well worth his while to cultivate an acquaintance with the editors, whose prefaces are not only filled with useful information but often adorned with bits of wisdom, expressions of devotion to the cause, and other items of a more poignant character. It is interesting, for example, to speculate about the identity of Reginald Lane Poole's slovenly copyist, whose faults are so devastatingly exposed in the preface to De dominio divino. And it is more than interesting to learn, from Rudolf Buddensieg's preface to the Polemical Works, that in 1880 the Delegates of the Oxford University Press refused to publish them; one may agree with Buddensieg that as of that date England was ungratefully remiss in her debt to “the memory of one of her greatest men.” Fortunately the Wycliff Society was formed in 1882 to remedy the lack, and in the short space of thirty years managed to publish almost all of the religio-political works, in about twenty-five volumes, and a number of the philosophical works as well. The collaboration between English and German scholars that made this success possible is amply attested in the prefaces, even down to the inevitable German claim, based to be sure on fact, that they had done the bigger share. Just as well, perhaps, if Buddensieg was right when he judged that “to edit mediaeval texts critically is work not very familiar to English scholars.”

“In hope that sends a shining ray/far down the future's broadening way…” Quoting these lines from a well-known hymn by the Social Gospel pioneer Washington Gladden, Clarence Reidenbach, a Congregationalist minister in Holyoke, Massachusetts, addressed himself late in 1930 to the question of the meaning of the New Year: “Was Dr. Gladden right? Is life really a broadening way” Or, to put the matter in the language of a classic of intellectual history, is “the idea of progress”—in Professor Bury's words the idea “that civilization has moved, is moving, and will move in a desirable direction”—a valid description of social reality? Reidenbach had no doubt that it was. that it was. “I have at least two great reasons for optimism” that the future is in fact a broadening way, he continued. “One is my confidence in God … the other is that history shows progress.”

Neither a theologian nor a church historian, I approach my task as a discussant of a paper on “The Idea of Progress in Most Recent Protestant Thought” with a great deal of hesitation. Nevertheless, there are parallels between the development of thought about history among Protestant theologians and American historians since the early nineteen-thirties.