In a recent article I argued that the famous Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century were by birth members of the eastern empire's municipal aristocracy, the so-called curial class. Libanius of Antioch, himself born of a curial family, indicates that this social class was characterized by three traditional values: civic patriotism, devotion to Greek paideia and a strong sense of the importance of family ties and tradition. The purpose of the present essay is to focus on the first and most important component of the threcfold “curial ideal” —that is, civic patriotism — and to investigate the extent to which this value of the social circles to which the Fathers belonged influenced their thought and action as clerics. Although Gregory of Nyssa, the youngest of the Cappadocian Fathers, was not at all immune to the influence of other curial values, our sources reveal little effect of civic patriotism upon his clerical activity. Therefore our study will concentrate on the older Cappadocians, Bishop Gregory the Elder of Nazianzus, his son Bishop Gregory of Nazianzus and Bishop Basil of Caesarea.

Those historical compositions designated as annals are exceedingly valuable sources for knowledge of the Carolingian period, none more so that the so-called Annales regni Francorum, covering an interval beginning with the death of Charles Martel and ending with the last untroubled year of Louis the Pious (741–829). For half a century (759–808) the chronicle of each year generally includes a note indicating the place where the ruler celebrated the feast of Nativity. Some years also include a reference to Easter. Thirty-seven times the allusion is to both Christmas and Easter (759–774, 777–779, 781–783, 788–792, 795–798, 800–802, 806–808); nine to Christmas only (775, 780, 784, 786, 793, 799, 803–805); four to Christmas and two Easters (776, 785, 787, 794); but none to Easter alone. The repetitive, formulaic way in which the references are introduced suggests the high festival character of celebration and observance.

Judged by any standard, Marsilius (Marsiglio, 1270–1343) of Padua represented one of the most strikingly innovative thinkers in the history of Christian thought. Because he was one of the pioneers in the struggle for an uncontested erastianism and because of his forthright condemnation of the papacy, it was inevitable that his epitaph would be shrouded in controversy. A movement that clearly evidenced a positive dependence on Marsilius' thought was the Henrician Reformation. Although many students of the Henrician Reformation (notably A.G. Dickens) have recognized the figure of Marsilius looming in the background, none have delineated the precise relationship of his thought to the English Reformation. Contrary to prevailing assumptions, Marsilius, not Machiavelli, Wycliff, Erasmus or Tyndale furnished the prevailing ideological framework within which the Henrician Reformation was justified.

Nineteenth-century denominational newspapers, relatively unavailable to historians until recently, constitute an important untapped source of information regarding public attitude toward national issues. Unlike the more commonly cited religious quarterlies and convention records, the weekly newspapers sought to provide their readers with regular news and comments about secular events. To be sure, articles on doctrine and evangelism seldom relinquished the prominence of page one. But news of the latest steamboat disaster, the new moldboard plow and last week's congressional proceedings were regularly mixed with local church items on pages three and four. And as the nation faced crises of significant proportion, editors often felt it their duty to offer their prescriptions in lengthy editorials on page two. Nowhere in the church apparatus was there a more obvious place for secular concerns to receive religious scrutiny. Widely circulated, welcoming reader response and edited by clergymen responsible to the denomination as a whole but particularly to the churchmen of their respective regions, the papers provide the best running account of religious response to troubles of the nation. For an age still steeped in the discourse and habit of churchly practice, they provide a perspective which historians can ill afford to neglect.

In January 1879 William Graham Sumner, Professor of Political and Social Science at Yale, assigned as a textbook the popular work by Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology. In a letter to the trustees in June 1880, the president of the college, Noah Porter, objected to the use of the volume. He suggested that Spencer's atheistic materialism would intellectually, morally and religiously harm immature students and bring notoriety to be the institution. Instead, of course, Noah Porter acquired the notoriety in this early and widely publicized case of academic freedom. William Graham Sumner was judged to be a bold and heroic spokesman for professional prerogatives, an uncompromising teacher of the new discipline of sociology. And Noah Porter served the sentence of historical disrepute that the supporters of Sumner passed on him.

In an influential book of thirty years ago, The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915, Charles Howard Hopkins interpreted the founding in 1908 of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America, the forerunner of the present National Council, as a stage in the flowering of the social gospel in American Christianity. His interpretation was soon confirmed by John Alexander Hutchison. In We Are Not Divided, a study of the pronouncements of the Federal Council, Hutchison wrote that the Federal Council was born of the marriage between “the idea of social service and the idea of interdenominational cooperation”. By “the idea of interdenominational cooperation”, however, Hutchison meant little more than what Hopkins had already defined as the impulse for social Christianity, and there the matter has rested for subsequent historians, including two former secretaries of the Federal Council.

Despite their ultimate breakdown, the Malines Conversations (1921–1926) between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church were an event of momentous significance for the communions engaged in them. They heralded changing times, for Rome a cautious step from ultra-monantism and anti-Modernism towards the “aggiornamento” of John XXIII, and for the Church of England a partial triumph of the new-found desire for church union over older attitudes of “no-popery.” But their real importance can be set in wider perspective: the guarded measure of mutual recognition they introduced marked, in one respect at least, the end to four centuries of schism.