The sixth-century Gallic episcopacy contained within its ranks three distinct groups of men. The first group comprised those who had come to the episcopacy from a monastic background; the tradition of the monk-bishop, nurtured in the fifth century by the monastery of Lérins, was still strong, particularly in southern Gaul. The second group consisted of men who, although celibate, were not monks. The third group was composed of married clerics who at the time of ordination had taken a vow of sexual continence. Since source material for this period is comparatively scanty and many bishops are little more than names to us, we have no means by which to establish the proportion of men in the Gallic episcopacy who fit in this third category.1 The most we can say is that the married bishop was a familiar figure in the Merovingian church.

In 1710 the English biblical commentator Matthew Henry declared that no book was more “serviceable” for the “right ordering” of human behavior than the biblical book of Proverbs. According to him, that scriptural collection of precepts and maxims comprised “a complete body of divine ethics, politics, and economics” which exposed vice and recommended virtue. The book of Proverbs provided “rules” governing “every relation and condition.” Henry noted that Proverbs was written for the use of all persons, but especially for the simple, the ignorant, and the young. Youth is the time of learning, he stated, the age of instruction and impressions.

The Subscription Controversy of the 1770s, often called the Clerical Petition Controversy to distinguish it from other subscription controversies, was just one aspect of the prolonged struggle between liberals, or Latitudinarians, and conservatives within the Anglican church, and it soon was connected with the similar struggle within the Dissenting denominations. There are no full-length modern studies of the Subscription Controversy, but books dealing with various aspects of eighteenth-century religious history often mention it.1

The effects of the condemnation of Modernism in the opening decades of the twentieth century were deep and far reaching. The Vatican, continuing its long-standing feud with doctrinal Modernism, took sharp, decisive action on 3 July 1907 when the Holy Office issued a syllabus, Lamentabili sane exitu, listing sixty-five condemned propositions taken mostly from the writings of the noted French theologian and exegete Alfred Loisy.1 Two months later, on 8 September, Pius X renewed the attack with his anti-Modernist encyclical, Pascendi Dominici gregis.2 The encyclical outlined and condemned “most attempts then being made by European Catholics, priests and laity, to incorporate the most recent nonscholastic research and scholarship into the development of theology and scripture studies.”

The purpose of this paper is to continue and perhaps to further discussion of the basic assumptions that long have undergirded the various general interpretative survey histories of Christianity and religion in America.1 Attention to particular problems, issues, and regions and the struggle with new methods have made available fresh insights into the nature of religious history in the American context. These insights raise the question of whether another general survey history of Christianity or of religion in America can or ought to be written until the profession develops a more adequate interpretive framework built solidly on recent research.