The present essay briefly examines evidence for the development of the mendicant orders, focusing on their relationship to important members of the middle and upper classes in the communes as one of the chief ways in which they gained popularity and public support. These orders came into existence between the late twelfth century and the latter half of the thirteenth. Their increased involvement with the laity was both a direct product of their concern with the needs of the contemporary church and a source of conflict between them and the existing monastic and diocesan clergy. The experience of the Humiliati in various dioceses in northern Italy illustrates an important point, namely the growing divisions within the church and the tendency to label various groups as heretical. The condemnation of the Humiliati and other groups by Pope Lucius III in Verona in 1183 is a sign of the increasing sensitivity to the danger of heresy among the laity within the leadership of the church.

Richard Greenham, rector from 1570 to 1591 at Dry Dayton Church outside of Cambridge, England, once preached a sermon based on I Thessalonians 5:19 (“Quench not the spirit”). Not one to let the brevity of a biblical text limit his own exegesis, Greenham offered up a sermon of nearly seven thousand words that likely took the better part of an hour to deliver. At the heart of Greenham's message was the proposition, “Whether that man which hath once tasted of the spirite may loose it, and have it quenched in him.” Greenham was a leading light among “the godly,” a group of mostly Cambridge- and Oxford-educated Protestant clergy who, working within the boundaries of the institutional Church, sustained a significant evangelical effort in England during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These reformers embraced with some fervor a theology grounded in the veracity of election and reprobation, and worked to instill a like enthusiasm in the general population. In particular, the godly's message focused on how an individual might identify the marks of divine election and gain assurance of salvation.

On a Sunday morning, early in the eighteenth century, Anglican minister James Blair accused male members of his Virginia congregation of attending church “on the purpose that they may feed their lustful Eyes.” Criticizing his hearers for unleashing their “Wanton Desires” through “Undecent, Lascivious Glances, and ogling Gestures,” Blair called on them to keep their “Hearts … eagerly intent upon Devotion” so as to “keep out the Wandring both of Eyes and Heart.” James Blair was not the only Virginia minister worried about the “irregular Wandring” of his parishioners' eyes and minds during weekly services.

Toward the end of the first third of the nineteenth century, German writers began to favor a new metaphor for the afterlife: “das Jenseits” (“the Beyond”). At first glance, the emergence of such a term may appear to have little bearing on our understanding of the history of religious thought. However, as the late historian Reinhart Koselleck maintained, the study of semantic changes can betray tectonic shifts in the matrix of ideas that underpin the worlds of politics, learning, and religion. Drawing on Koselleck's method of conceptual history, the following essay takes the popularization of “the Beyond” as a point of departure for investigating secularization and secularism as two linked, yet distinct, sources of pressure on the fault lines of nineteenth-century German religious thought.

In the spring of 1831, Methodist minister John Price Durbin delivered an evangelical sermon that assumed his listeners were familiar with the basic rules of science. “Are planetary worlds seen revolving in their orbits harmoniously and steadily?” he asked his rural Kentucky audience. “Is a little microscopic insect seen in the dust, or in the down of a peach, or in a drop of water?” The answer, of course, was yes—though Durbin saw no need to say so. His questions were merely rhetorical; the Methodists listening to his sermon knew, after all, that planetary worlds and microscopic insects existed, even if not all of them had had the opportunity to see these natural phenomena firsthand. Scientists had proved that the phenomena existed, and in 1831, the authority of science was to be trusted.