Four hundred years ago this autumn William Tindale was executed at Vilvorde, a few miles south of Antwerp. So ended an adventurous career which began some forty years earlier in the soft western vales of Gloucestershire. The family acres, while not too broad, made possible a university education, which resulted in the youth becoming an Oxford M. A. in 1515. More important, it brought him in contact with the works of Erasmus, whose ardent disciple he became. Settling in his native region as chaplain and tutor to one of the important county families, he soon distinguished himself as a champion of the new learning. In this work he found himself handicapped by lack of suitable English books. He therefore translated his Dutch master's Enchiridion, and resolved to answer the great humanist's call for vernacular scriptures available to the masses. But the church authorities of his diocese were hostile, and, in any case, for such work he needed greater facilities than those of a country parish.

By the witness of history, the indebtedness of higher learning to religious fervor is very great. This aspect of education deserves at least as much attention as the retardation and perversion of learning by religious bigotry. The latter is, as we all know, most frequently and loudly stressed today. Again, we hear little of the fact that periods when learning has been gradually secularized have been periods when scholarship grew lax and knowledge halted; until a new impulse of religious conviction re-vivified both the souls and the minds of scholars, with the restilt that academies and universities pulsed with fresh enthusiasm and notable advancement in learning took place. But of many instances of this phenomenon the mention of Abailard and the University of Paris, Wyclif and Oxford, Luther and Wittenberg, Cartwright and Emmanuel, Wolff and Halle, Fichte and Berlin, must suffice. Yet none is more illustrative of our conclusions than Harvard, the creation of the Congregational Puritanism of William Ames.

History knows men who did not begin till they were in the middle of their days. It is only on approaching or entering the forties that some people seem to strike the line of their real achievement. Up to that period they may have been active and useful, but they have not awakened to their vocation; as yet they are unconscious of their true powers. While this does not apply to the spheres of art and music, it is far from being uncommon in politics and literature. There, as any student of biography soon becomes aware, a man may not find himself till he is about forty. Sometimes it is then or thereabouts—nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita—that something happens, and a man of action, a thinker, an author, first gets the chance or the idea of doing what turns out to be the most significant thing in his career.

The terms “religion” and “asceticism” represent separable realms of experience. Asceticism may occur where a Stoic philosopher, from purely ethical considerations, denies all indulgence to the appetites of the body, that “gaol and shackle of the soul.” It is today employed, in Egypt and in India, in the strategy of political causes. The athlete or the actor, the scholar or the merchant, may adopt an ascetic type of behavior for the sake of efficiency on a non-religious level. On the other hand feasting may be as religious as fasting, jubilation as holy as penance.

One of the intrinsic weaknesses of our historical studies is that we can understand the past only by utilizing analogies to our age. What we comprehend of past events or personalities most readily is the features which they seem to have in common with our own forms of life, and it is from these associations that we take our cue in exploring the past. We know how fallacious this method can be, since a closer study of the historical landscape possibly reveals that what we regarded as a landmark had actually little significance in its own age and what we believed a resemblant factor was nothing but a superficial similarity. So we have very often to burn the bridges over which we entered into the territory of the past.

There are few more enigmatic figures in the history of the Church of England than Archbishop Laud. During his lifetime he was assailed by his opponents with almost every crime that their bitterness could suggest, while his friends spoke of him in terms of somewhat measured praise. Dead, to those who disagreed with him he still seemed the “Pope of Canterbury,” only a little less than Antichrist himself, while his followers, hailing him as a martyr to his faith, soon forgot all his qualities but those that seemed to typify the Church of England, by him restored to its proper glories.

The history of the Plan of Union has been written largely under the influence of denominational zeal, jealousy, and antipathy. Underlying much of the writing have been the assumptions that a main object of religious endeavor is to build up denominational organizations and enlarge the statistics, that denominations ought to be kept “pure,” that movements of individuals or churches from one to another are not altogether creditable and justify suspicion of inferior motives on the part of somebody. For example, the Rev. James H. Dill, in an article on “Congregationalism in Western New York” in the Congregational Quarterly in 1859, which has recently been cited as an authority, refers to churches “which have been spirited away from Congregationalism”; and Dr. Joseph P. Thompson, in an article on “Congregationalism in Eastern New York” in the same periodical in 1860, says “The Black River Association … had increased to seventeen churches when in 1817, it was induced to unite with the Watertown Presbytery. … After some years, some of the Congregational churches withdrew from this entanglement, and re-organized in an Association.” On the other side, Dr. Samuel J. Baird in 1868 said in A History of the New School, “The multiplication of Congregational ministers, in the Presbyterian Church, was no increase of strength; but the introduction of an element of weakness, division and heresy.”

Roger Williams is justly famous in history as the Pioneer Statesman of Religious Liberty. He can never be robbed of this distinction and honor. But it is not the only cause for which he should be famous. According to the well known story, arriving in Massachusetts Bay Colony on February 5, 1631, he declined an invitation to become minister of the Boston Church because it was constituted of “an unseparated people,” still holding fellowship with the Church of England, and because the civil magistrates of the Bay punished for breaches of the First Table, that is exerted authority in religious affairs. After years of controversy with the authorities of the Bay, sentence of banishment was passed upon him in October, 1635, and in January, 1636, he was forced to leave its jurisdiction. Reaching the Narragansett country, he established the Providence Community and later Rhode Island Colony.

From the opening of the eighteenth century to the close of the Revolution the cause and interests of the Church of England were promoted in the American colonies mainly by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. During this period that organization, commonly known as the S. P. G., employed in the colonies a total of three hundred different missionaries. These men were settled throughout the thirteen colonies, but because of the privileged position occupied by the church in Virginia and Maryland, the distribution was by no means equalized.

The defenders of John Calvin have sought to excuse his share in the execution of Servetus by resorting to the type of apologetic employed by Catholics in defense of the Inquisition. The victims, we are told, were politically and socially subversive and would have been suppressed in any age. In the case of Servetus this charge cannot be substantiated from his writings, since he did not reject the oath, nor the authority of the magistrate, neither did he counsel immorality. The only recourse for the apologists is to connect Servetus with Calvin's political opponents, the so-called Libertines. The argument has assumed slightly different forms in different hands, but three main contentions emerge: 1) that Servetus plotted with the Libertines for the overthrow of Calvin's régime; 2) that the Libertines endeavored to bring about the acquittal of Servetus; and 3) that they communicated with him to that end during the course of his trial.

Presbyterians are fond of pointing out that their General Assembly was organized in the year which witnessed the adoption of our Federal Constitution, and that the republican organization of their central government corresponds in many respects to that of the “more perfect Union” which the people of the United States decided in 1788 to set up. Michigan Presbyterians may with reason cite a parallel coincidence in dates of establishment: the Synod of Michigan was founded in September, 1834, only about six months before the people of the territory elected delegates to draw up a state constitution. From this common chronological beginning, both Michigan organizations developed rapidly, and naturally their histories were closely related.

The year 1936 marks the four hundredth anniversary of the Institutes of the Christian Religion In that work is contained the mature expression of Calvin's religious thought. Attention may well be centered, at this time, upon one of the most procreative conceptions contained in the Institutes—a conception still rich in suggestions for our community of Christian life. The conception is that of the “societas fidelium” or the “communia sanctorum.” In the following study the “communia sanctorum” is considered in relation to its concept and to predestination, cult, discipline, and social service.

The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions appointed its first men to the Turkish empire in 1818. Five years afterward (1823) the Board's Syrian Mission was established at Beirut, where shortly two Armenian ecclesiastics were received into the Mission church as the first-fruits of American missionary labors in Turkey. In 1831 William Goodell, of the Syrian Mission established himself at Constantinople, where he was joined the following year by a new recruit, Henry Dwight. These men were under instructions to devote themselves to Armenian work in the Turkish capital. Thus was begun the Board's Armenian Mission.

During the closing years of Pius IX's pontificate the relations between church and state in Italy were marred by incessant and acrimonious strife. The occupation of Rome on September 20, 1870 had widened the breach between the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. The subsequent course of this feud brought no attenuation of existing animosities. The implacable hostility of the Vatican to the new order of things in the peninsula spurred the Italian government to take drastic measures against the church and its recalcitrant hierarchy. Decisive too in the launching of this concerted offensive was the eagerness of the country's rulers to accelerate the secularization of Italian life. To these recurrent assaults the Holy See invariably replied with a barrage of protests and denunciations which reverberated throughout the Catholic world. Each fresh crisis was accompanied by recriminations which threw into sharp relief the formidable barriers to an understanding between these seemingly irreconcilable foes.

Somewhere in the complicated pattern of colonial fears that were aroused by legislation, actual or proposed, during the fifteen years preceding the American Revolution, an indeterminate space must be found for the so-called Mayhew Controversy. Coming into the open in 1763, this anti-Anglican outbreak drew its life from roots which stretched profusely into the past. This study aims not only to describe the various sources of the controversy, but also to point out several of its more interesting characteristics.

The Lutheran church in America has always been faced with the problem of language. Because Lutherans have come to America from continental Europe, there has been the question from earliest colonial days as to which language, or languages, would be used in the services of worship.

Although the social gospel has been described as “the first expression of American religious life which is truly born in America itself,” it was evoked upon the American scene by forces, world-wide in scope, which have everywhere brought about similar reactions in the field of religion. The full setting in of the industrial revolution in country after country of Western civilization created such problems for religion as to lead within a generation to a vigorous enunciation of a social ethic by alert religious leaders of the country. The decade of the 1770's in England saw the beginnings of what Lewis Mumford calls the “paleotechnic” phase of civilization and within a generation Wilberforce and the “Clapham Sect” were thundering against the iniquities of the slave trade. Despite the passions of the great war with France, the cold rigidities of the “dismal science,” and the distracting ecclesiastical convulsions of the Oxford Movement, the development of a social emphasis in religion went on to find expression in the charities of Peabody and Shaftesbury, and the positive teachings of Maurice and Kingsley.

In Saint Augustine's time two theories concerning the origin of the church of Africa were current in Africa and Italy: either the Carthaginian church had been founded by missionaries from the church of Rome or the Gospel had been brought from various eastern lands. Carthage was undoubtedly the center from which Christianity spread throughout the whole of North Africa. As the number of converts increased and the churches multiplied, the same problems of organization arose and were solved as in other parts of the Empire, and ecclesiastical administration followed the lines of demarcation used by the civil power. Under Diocletian a reorganization of the imperial administrative scheme had taken place, and the Diocese of Africa, extending from Cyrenaica on the East to the Malva and Mount Atlas on the West, was comprised of the provinces of Tripolitana, Byzacenum, Proconsular Africa, Numidia, Mauretania Sitifiensis, and Mauretania Caesariensis. The district to the West, Mauretania Tingitana, was attached to the Diocese of Spain. By the end of the fourth century the church had created six provinces following the same lines, with the exception that Tingitana, although not a part of Africa politically formed a part of the ecclesiastical province of Mauretania Caesariensis. The last province to be created was Mauretania Sitifiensis, which was granted a primate by the Council of Hippo in 393.