Nestorius continues to be a problem for modern historians of doctrine. The Problem arose in the fifth century when the church acting at the Council of Ephesus (431 A.D.) anathematized Nestorius, the Bishop of Constantinople, and pronounced Nestorianism a christological heresy. The decisions of the Council of Ephesus were accepted and re-affirmed at the Fourth (451 A.D.) and Fifth (553 A.D.) Ecumenical Councils. It must be said that “Nestorianism” as a special kind of doctrine could have been condemned as heretical could be called “dyoprosopatism.” But such was not the case. Nestorius was condemned and exiled as a heretic, and he was judged on the basis of certain doctrines which he was accused of holding. From the moment of his excommunication until the present time there have been many expressions of uncertainty as to whether he really taught and believed what was defined and condemned as Nestorianism. Somewhat epigrammatically historians have been asking whether Nestorius himself was a Nestorian.

The problem of rendering to God what is God's is no less complex when Caesar is himself a Christian. Among the Anglo-Saxons, for example, “a Christian king is Christ's deputy among Christian people,” but both the royal role in religion and the offerings made to the divine were shaped by the Germanic heathenism which had embraced both. In the full flood of Christian monarchy in England, the ruler still participated in cosmic and earthly realms, a position presaged by that of his pagan ancestors but involving, inevitably, changing forms and problems. The king was still the head of the folk under divine auspices, and a separation of religion and royal function was as unthinkable as under paganism. The English ruler stood in a special relationship to the Divine King, and the doctrine of separation of powers between ruler and Church was as abhorrent to the latter, which had inundated the kingdoms on the tide of royal favor, as it was impracticable to the monarch. The ruler was expected to play a theological and eschatological role for his people. The view of the king as doctor of his folk—the tuba praedicationis, as Alcuin hailed Offa of Mercia—leading them to judgment, cast a religious aura about him which was to continue a ruler-cult in Christian terms.

John Campanus was one of the two most notorious Antitrinitarians of northern Europe in the second quarter of the sixteenth century. While, unlike the other, Michael Servetus, he does not seem to have had any lasting marked influence on Antitrinitarian developments, the stir he created among his comtemporaries was considerable. His stature in his own time is partially attested to, albeit negatively, both in a letter of Luther's in 1531 in which he identified Campanus as an adversary of the Son of God who blasphemed Christ even more than Arius had,2 and in the “mild” Melanchthon's opinion— given in response to a statement by Luther that the best way to deal with Campanus was to ignore him—that one should, rather, hitch him to the gallows. Somewhat more positive esteem, on the other hand, is intimated in a letter written to Cardinal Cervini in 1541 by the Catholic reformer Albert Pighius, whose opinion it was of one of Campanus' writings that no other writing of the time, either by a Catholic or a Lutheran, displayed greater erudition and ingenuity.

The present emphasis upon local history as the foundation for a reinterpretation of national events has already affected the historiography of seventeenth century English Puritanism. Attention has been focused on the manuscript records relating to the City of London, many of which had never before been searched by historians, since it was apparent that a reassessment of London's role in the Puritan Revolution was long overdue. The outstanding example of this new approach to the history of London is Valerie Pearl's excellent book, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: City Government and National Politics, 1625–43. In addition, the present writer has described Puritan activities between 1610 and 1640 in the City government and in the parishes of St. Stephen, Coleman Street, and St. Botolph Without Aldgate. Still, a need remains for more detailed knowledge of Puritanism in the City's important corporate groups— not only the governing bodies and the parishes, but also the great London livery companies. The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct the story of Puritanism in the Haberdashers' Company, the livery company which seems to have been the most successful in promoting Puritan preaching in England between 1600 and 1640.

By about 1650, the seventeenth century Puritan search for the New Jerusalem led many an English enthusiast to the conviction that the millennial Kingdom of Christ was at hand. This current in Puritan thought had been gaining force since Thomas Brightman wrote his exegesis on Revelation at the beginning of the century. With the coming of the civil war, the trickle begun by Brightman (and taken up by a few others before 1642) soon developed into a major stream. John Archer, Robert Maton, Jeremiah Burroughes, and William Bridge, to name but some, penned works that increased interest and heightened expectation in the subject during the decade of the forties. The infection even caught John Milton who briefly seemed convinced that the great millennial age was imminent.

Recently Millenarianism has received increasing attention in Puritan Studies. The heretical character of Millenarianism (as well as the apparent failure of all past prophecies concerning that age) has contributed to the essential neglect of the phenomenon by historians who have stood in denominational traditions which were shaped by that revolutionary age. The new interest in Puritan Millenarianism is linked to an awareness of the role of the Spirit in Puritan thought. It is also part of a broader appreciation of the apocalytic ideological ingredient which is present in revolutionary periods. Thus Mr. Cohen's discussion is timely as a contribution to a developing analysis both of Puritan Millenarianism and also revolutionary apocalypticism more generally. In my comments on the paper I would like to distinguish between the thesis itself and several assumptions which are implicit in Mr. Cohen's application of it. I will suggest that if other assumptions were to be substituted it would be necessary to find a different significance in the thesis, but that in that process the thesis would be sustantiated.

Cannibals - mountebanks - charlatans - pious and whining hypocrites - necromancers - pseudo-Christians - mystery mongers. These are among the epithets which Thomas Jefferson applied to the clergy of the Protestant denominations and of the Roman Catholic Church as well. It was they who “perverted” the principles of Jesus “into an engine for enslaving mankind”; it was the Christian “priesthood” who had turned organized religion into a “mere contrivance to filch wealth and power” for themselves; they were the ones who throughout history had persecuted rational men for refusing to swallow “their impious heresies.”