At the beginning of the fourth century the Roman aristocracy was, for the most part, pagan in its religious attitude. By the end of that century the aristocracy had undergone what Peter Brown has described as a “sea change”: its pagan values had become redefined within the context of Christianity. This “drift into respectable Christianity” was the result of the process of socialization in the households of the Roman senatorial class over several generations. Brown suggests that the fourth-century Christianization of the aristocracy was the achievement of those upper-class Roman women who, by continuing to practice their Christian religion in the households of their pagan husbands, established the syncretistic milieu which would influence the religious attitudes of the next generation. But the apparent calm of Brown's anonymous culture-bearers is disturbed by a small group of women whose religious extremism delineates them sharply from their peers. Rejecting wholly the society into which they were born, they fled the cloying Roman atmosphere for the harsh air of the desert. The “respectable Christianity” that Rome was adopting offered them no satisfaction.

The national church of Armenia has enjoyed an autonomous status within the community of Christian churches since the late fourth century. At that time King Pap broke its ties with Caesarea of Cappadocia, the city in which Gregory the Illuminator, the apostle of Armenia, had received his mandate and consecration. Thereafter the hierarchy of the church was chosen within the nation according to its own rules. The head of the church, the catholicos, was the chief bishop of the Armenians and, like the kingship, the catholicate became an hereditary office according to a custom established by Gregory himself.

In 1894 Heinrich Denifle showed conclusively that the official textbook of masters in theology in the medieval university was the Bible. At one time historians commonly assumed that masters in theology lectured on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, a most subtle and thought-provoking book. There are so many medieval commentaries on the Sentences, both published and unpublished, and so many great masters did in fact comment on the Sentences that it was easy enough to assume that this was the set text for masters in the universities. Today there can be no doubt. Normally only bachelors lectured on the Sentences before being promoted to the rank of master. Once the young man became a master in sacred theology, he was not allowed to lecture on the Lombard. His task was to lecture on the sacred scriptures, and his official title was magister in sacra pagina, Master of the Sacred Page.

Two statements written prior to 1642 have suggested the title of this piece. The first statement comes during the spring of 1623 from Joseph Mead, a Cain- bridge University don and newsletter correspondent. In a letter Mead says he has observed three sorts of puritans:

First a Puritan in politicks, or the Politicali Puritan, in matters of State, liberties of people, prerogatives of sovereigns, etc. Secondly An Ecclesiasticall Puritan, for the Church Hierarchie and ceremonies, who was at first the onely Puritan. Thirdly A Puritan in Ethicks or moral Puritan sayd to consist in singularity of living, and hypocrisie both civil! and religious which may be called the vulgar Puritan, and was the second in birth and hath made too many ashamed to be honest.

It has been almost exiomatic to speak of Charles G. Finney as the religious spokesman for “the Age of Jackson,” and to see the optimistic view of man supposedly inherent in Finney's “new measures” revivalism as the religious equivalent of the Jacksonian faith in the worth and dignity of the common man. Finney's ablest interpreter, William G. McLoughlin, has contended that “Finney and Jackson, each in his own way, were striving for much the same kind of free, individualistic, and equalitarian society.” Expanding upon this contention, McLoughlin viewed the “‘revolutionary’ theology and revival measures” of Charles G. Finney as a congenial and compatible counterpart of the more general political, social, and intellectual revolution of Jacksonian America.

The Chicago school in American religious historiography, especially its two most distinguished representatives, W. W. Sweet and Sidney E. Mead, has emphasized the growth of religious liberty as a crucial factor in accounting for the characteristic shape of American Protestantism in the early nineteenth century. The effect of this interpretative hypothesis has been to emphasize the distinctiveness of American religious history while focusing attention so intensely upon American phenomena that evidence from European history which might have served to qualify that hypothesis has not yet received adequate attention.

In the 1860s the controversy over the widespread revival of such African customs as “lobolo” (bridewealth) and the development of concubinage among the Christian converts almost destroyed the American Board Mission (AZM), which had been founded in 1835. Suddenly—or so it seemed to the American missionaries—the obedient converts of the previous decades began to defend customs that, from the beginning of the mission, had been denounced as “heathen” by the missionaries.