Among American churchmen and statesmen, there has been a tendency to regard the Establishment of the Anglican Church entirely in the light of a privilege conferred by the State on one church to the exclusion of others. Where the idea of the Establishment has been derived from the sight of the immunities and official endowment enjoyed by the church of the colonial governor, this point of view is natural. It determined the early statesmen of the young republic to dispense with a luxury which appeared to them to be pregnant with oppression and arrogance. Externally there is little to criticize in the view for it represents fairly accurately the relative position of the Anglican Church both in colonial and English history in the eyes of non-Anglican communions. Internally, however, the case is not as simple, as the Free Churchman, whether within or without the Anglican fold, has been ready to detect, and Cartwright here is in complete accord with Newman. The conflict was brought to an issue when the House of Commons rejected the proposals for the revision of the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 in two consecutive years, 1927 and 1928.

Patriarch Nikon is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in Russian church history. A zealous, although needlessly harsh and domineering, reformer of the church, forceful to the point of being dictatorial in the exercise of his patriarchal office, his endeavor to make the church independent of the state precipitated a struggle which in the days of Peter the Great culminated in the abolition of the patriarchate and the subjugation of the church.

Students of the cultural history of the late Roman and Byzantine periods sometimes speculate as to what may have been the ordinary daily intellectual interests—the private store of detached thought and emotion—of the average educated men of those times. To us, the literary activity of those centuries seems a barren skeleton, picked bare by the sophists, an abhorrent thing in which we can find no real interest. The formal philosophy of the schools was a wild business whose fantastic flights seem to many of us today to be quite incredible and absurd. We can perhaps understand a little better the intellectual and political interest which attached to the theological controversies, though these often went to lengths which seem to us to be excessive. Private religious experience there was, of course, and there was an emotional outlet in Christian art which we can understand quite well. But even the total of these things will not perhaps satisfy our curiosity; whether rightly or wrongly, we find it difficult to understand that a man's life can have been made up of these things alone, and we wonder what a mind of at least some independence and vigor can have found as a basis for its individual existence.