The aim of this paper is to throw some light on Tertullian's attitude to military service. His statements on this subject are highly useful for a more accurate understanding of his own changing views on the empire and the duties of citizenship. They are also important evidence for marking a crucial stage in the pre-Constantinian evolution of the relations of church and state. It will be seen that the whole question of Christians serving in the Roman army became relevant only in the late second century; Tertullian is one of the earliest literary witnesses for this momentous development. Therefore, on both counts, the texts deserve close scrutiny.

As a defender of the Indians and an opponent of the methods used by the Spanish conquistadors, Bartolomé de Las Casas was as controversial a figure in the sixteenth century as he has been in the last four hundred years of historiography. Las Casas' fight to preserve the freedom of the Indians has gained for him not only devoted admirers, but also angry detractors.1 Las Casas was not the only Spaniard who defended the Indians, but his efforts are the best known. He labored for fifty years before death finally halted the steady flow of polemics from his pen. However, he was not just a sheltered academician like Vitoria, but he actively championed the rights of the Indians by working and living among them in the New World.

How did Christianity appear to men and women of the GrecoRoman world when it first began to emerge into public view? What ideas and conceptions were present within Roman “social thought” to identify and define a new phenomenon such as Christianity? What did men “see” when they looked at the Christians? In antiquity no one subjected the Christian movement to a social analysis or took a Gallup poll of popular opinions, but there is some evidence from which to gain an impression of how Christianity appeared to outsiders. As a methodological guideline I take the suggestion made by James Gustafson in his Treasure in Earthern Vessels.

Since H. L. Gray questioned the view that “Italian learning languished” between the death of Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, in 1447 and 1488 when John Colet, William Grocyn, and Thomas Linacre visited Italy, several scholars have attempted to show the nature of the new learning fostered in England by such intermediaries as Robert Flemmyng, William Selling, and John Free, among others. Roberto Weiss has investigated more thoroughly than anyone else the interest of these Englishmen in the new learning during that interval. His book brings the narrative to 1485, a time which for him marks the beginning of genuine English humanism.While there is no doubt that Colet, Grocyn, and Linacre were leaders of the avant garde of humanism or that Selling, Flemmying, and Free helped bridge the gap between 1447 and 1488, some less well-known men played an important part in the advance of the new learning.

In November, 1549, at the beginning of the third session of King Edward VI's first parliament, legislation was introduced intending to facilitate the reformation of the ecclesiastical laws of England. In the House of Lords, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and others submitted a bill “touching Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction” which would have given the bishops and their ordinaries the power to excommunicate and to imprison those who were in need of discipline in order to help tidy up what was regarded then to be an immoral and disorderly nation. This bill passed the House of Lords and was sent down to the House of Commons for consideration.

The relationship between the Renaissance and the Reformation is a major theme of sixteenth-century historical studies. Generally, the discussion of the influence of these two movements upon one another has centered on two facets of their relationship: first, the influence of the Renaissance in creating an intellectual atmosphere which fostered certain Reformation movements such as a revival of biblical studies, the rejection of scholasticism, and the undermining of the ecclesiastical authority of the Roman church; and secondly, the Reformation's rejection of Renaissance humanism because of its optimistic view of human nature. This latter relationship was exemplified in the debate between Martin Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam, the undisputed leaders of the respective movements during the early decades of the sixteenth century. While the question of the Reformation's dependence upon Renaissance intellectual movements is usually conceded (after all Luther did use Erasmus' edition of the Greek New Testament as the basis for his German translation), there has been little evaluation of the corresponding influence of the Reformation on Renaissance humanism.

The question concerning the authorship of A Brief and Clear Confession of the Christian Faith, ascribed to John Hooper, is raised in the only extensive work on Hooper, an unpublished dissertation written at the University of Zurich by W. M. S. West. West covers certain intrinsic difficulties involved in ascribing this work to Hooper and finds that this work

Gregor Heimburg, the bitter critic of the papacy and of Nicholas of Cusa, is said to have taunted Cusanus, saying that because Cusanus was defeated in a lawsuit in Mainz, he turned from the practice of law to theology.1 Heimburg, a utriusque iuris doctor who rendered his legal services to both secular and ecclesiastical princes, was certainly versed in the legal literature of his time. But, as we shall see below, history does not seem to bear out his insinuation that disappointment and failure in the field of law led Cusanus to take up theology as his career. It is probably of little importance to ask whether Cusanus would have continued to work as a lawyer had he won the case in Mainz. We must note, however, that Cusanus is so well known as a theologian, cardinal, philosopher, and even as a scientist that we are apt to forget his early career as a canon lawyer in the service of the archdiocese of Trier. It is only recently that due attention began to be paid to the legal activities of Cusanus.2 The purpose of this paper is to throw light not only on his education and activities as a canon lawyer, but also on the role which he played in the disputed episcopal election of 1430 in the archdiocese of Trier.

With the endowment of a lectureship for the defense of the Christion faith, the distinguished English natural philosopher, Robert Boyle, gave the Anglican church a unique opportunity to counter the atheistic currents of thought which were posing a challenge to the faithful in the late seventeenth century. Of the Boyle lectures preached between 1692 and 1713, the most important and popular ones incorporated the new natural philosophy of the age—including some of the recently published ideas of Newton—in an apologetic which was remarkable for its flexibility and its concern with contemporary theological issues. Within the institutional framework which Boyle's generosity had provided, certain of the Anglican clergy devoted themselves anew to the age-old exercise of utilizing the discoveries of science in the service of their faith. It was particularly appropriate that they do so since many of the challenges were based implicitly or explicitly on a materialistic and mechanistic science.

The sixteenth century was a crucial period in the history of French monasticism. In addition to the causes of a general decline throughout Europe, in France two peculiar developments precipitated a nearly fatal collapse of monastic establishments. One was the commendatory system that spread over the whole country following the Concordat of Bologna in 1516. Royally appointed commendatory abbots, whose only concern was the collection of their share of monastic income, contributed much to the moral and material decline of the institutions supposedly under their care. The other and even more devastating calamity was the series of religious and civil wars during the second half of the century that resulted in the pillage and partial or total destruction of hundreds of monasteries.

In the two decades from 1590 to 1610, there were three major events in the life of the Seven Provinces of the United Netherlands. In theology there was the outbreak of the so-called Arminian controversy over predestination and related issues, culminating in the polarizing of the Dutch Reformed Church into Remonstrant and Contra-remonstrant parties. In economics there was the transition from late-medieval and intra-European trade patterns to the new global and colonial patterns of the Dutch East India Company. In politics there was the signing of a truce with Spain, with the unprecedented granting of independence to a new nation by a great power.

Charles I, King of England and Scotland, appointed John Spottiswoode Chancellor of Scotland on December 23, 1634. This position was the last and highest bestowed upon a man who had served the crown faithfully for over three decades. Spottiswoode was ordained a minister in the Scottish Reformed (Presbyterian?) Church in 1583. In 1604 James named him Archbishop of Glasgow; in 1605, appointed him to the Privy Council; and in 1615, translated him to the Archbishopric of St. Andrews. In this position it fell to Spottiswoode to implement the Scottish ecclesiastical policy of James I, which consisted of an attempt to make the Scottish Kirk more episcopal in form. In the early stages of the transfromation which dealt with structure Spottiswoode was successful. However, in the final analysis, he failed because, even though the Five Articles of Perth which contained the liturgical changes were ratified by the Perth General Asembly of 1616 and by Parliament in 1621, they did not receive general acceptance. Nothing that Spottiswoode did quieted the vocal opposition among the clergy and laity.1 These groups became the nucleus of the opposition to Charles in the 1630s.

In a day when every theological curriculum is under fire and every presupposition of theological education is being questioned, there is both comfort and challenge in the discovery that things have been like that for a long time. Unfortunately, most histories of nineteenthcentury theology treat the great minds of that era in a way that emphasizes abstract relationships rather than concrete situations. Schleiermacher, Baur, Ritschl and the rest often seem to swim in a theological firmament far removed from the knotty problems of curriculum, faculty freedom, and social responsibility which beset contemporary theologians.

Madame de Staël, in her monumental study of German culture, L'Allemagne, wrote of the Catholic church at the dawn of the nineteenth century: “Today, standing disarmed, it has the majesty of an aged lion which formerly made the universe tremble.”1 The French empire, continuing the policy of the revolution, confiscated ecclesiastical property wherever it expanded. By 1804 Napoleon distributed the church's land in Germany—which had been the most extensive in her possession of any country in Christendom—among his client rulers on the right bank of the Rhine.2 All over Europe princes were dissolving monastic communities in order to make their revenues available to the state. Perhaps the church suffered her crowning indignity in 1809, when Napoleon responded to a dispute with the pope by making him his prisoner.

The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars took the English into Europe in unprecedented numbers, and, once there, they stayed. Commerce and industry followed inevitably in the wake of the armies; colonies of Englishmen sprang up in places not previously centres of international trade; English industrialists promoted factories and railways, operated and maintained by English workmen. The new industrial aristocracy chose to spend its vacations in Europe, usually at the fashionable watering places, and some were sent by their physicians into more or less permanent European exile. Not without reason did the Christian Remembrancer ask rhetorically, in 1845, if there was yet a square yard of ground in all the five continents which the restless curiosity of the English traveller had not raked over. Yet, if psychologically, there was no longer “any such thing as a foreign country” for the affluent nineteenth century Englishman, Europe remained for all practical purposes the limit of the horizon: and it was within this ambit that the transformation was most substantial. Sporting members of parliament had their château in Provence or their schloss in Hungary where their forebears had been content with a shooting-box on the Yorkshire moors, and undergraduates went off fly-fishing during the long vacation to Norway rather than to Wales. Altogether, the knowledgeable Anglo-German, George Biber put the English population on the continent in 1845 at between 200,000 and 300,000.1 There was no doubt about it; whatever government policy was to be, England's psychological isolation from Europe was at an end.

Gibbon was scrupulous and generous in discharging his intellecttual and scholarly debts. The footnotes in the Decline and Fall (which comprise about a fourth of the work) are a candid and reliable index of the materials used in its composition. The reader of Gibbon is most forcefully struck by those mordant remarks which annihilate the work—and occasionally the character—of some obscure pedant. But the majority of Gibbon's notes are elegant apostrophes to the scholarship that supports the Decline and Fall. Of all the secondary authorities cited by Gibbon—there are nearly 3,000 such references— none is so frequently cited (about 250 times) and praised as Sebastien LeNain de Tillemont. He is “that learned Jansenist,” “the indefatigable Tillemont,” “the accurate M. de Tillemont”; and in one of those felicitous metaphors of which Gibbon was a master, Tillemont is “the patient and sure-footed mule of the Alps” who “may be trusted in the most slippery paths.

Over one hundred years have passed since the conception in 1865 of what became known as the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral. This statement of Episcopalian, ecumenical principles was conceived by William R. Huntington (1838–1909), acknowledged leader of the denomination's House of Deputies, liturgical scholar, and “first presbyter” of his generation.1 Huntington was inspired by the national disunity of the Civil War years and by the reunion of the states in 1865 to seek some means of uniting the country's churches. At the same time he recognized that the Episcopal church stood in need reform if it were to serve in any way whatever as an agent of reconciliation. The result was the famous Quadrilateral. Its author designed his proposal both as a statement of “the true Anglican position” and as a basis for church unity, soon to be expressed, it was hoped, in a comprehensive, national church for America.

The American Colonization Society was organized in 1816 for the purpose of colonizing the free Negroes of the United States. After a series of difficulties, the society, in 1821, sent to Liberia Lott Cary who provided leadership and direction in this colony until his premature death in 1828. Advocates of African colonization were motivated by various and sometimes divergent ideals. One was the belief that colonization of the American free Negro in Africa would be a means of spreading Christianity and civilization to that continent. Although Cary was not always enthusiastic about the American Colonization Society and its policies, it never sent anyone to Liberia who more nearly fulfilled this ideal. By the time of his death the Liberian colony was firmly planted.

“Only the shell of orthodoxy was left.” Such was the considered judgment of Henry Adams on the condition of the inherited socioreligious order of New England by the year 1800.1 The image of the shell of a gourd with loose seeds rattling within is a good one to convey the dissociation between the purposes of the society and the real beliefs of individuals that had come to pass by the end of the eighteenth century. And it presents a notable contrast to the close congruence of individual belief and the social aims of the first generation of New England Puritans.

After having surveyed the barrenness of the valley in which were scattered skeletal remains, the prophet in the book of Ezekiel was asked, “O mortal man, can these bones live?” And his reply was not an optimistic “they will live” but rather “O Lord God, thou knowest.” When the historian begins to discuss the common theological assumptions and issues which perplexed the seventeenth century, he does not know whether they can be put into a meaningful context and is uncertain that these “bones” can be made to live. The recent historian who made a large American audience aware of seventeenth-century thought was the late Perry Miller who summarized the New England strands of thought in an essay entitled “The Marrow of Puritan Divinity.” Miller argued that theology was a part of the essence, the very marrow, of Puritanism to which a copious amount of thought was devoted. The seriousness of the Puritan concern was witnessed by the succession of able theologians from William Ames and Richard Baxter in the seventeenth century, to Solomon Stoddard, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Chauncy in the eighteenth century.